ICM • THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPARATIVE MODERNITIES

HIGHLIGHTS

ABOUT THE ICM

he Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) addresses a key problem in the study of modern culture and society: the transnational history of modernity and its global scope. A broad range of scholarship over the last few decades has contested and complicated the two primary dimensions of the received narrative of modernity: that it arose strictly within the confines of Europe; and that its extension outside Europe was a matter of simple diffusion and imitation. What is emerging instead is an account of modernity as a global process in which deep and multifarious interconnections have created complementary cultural formations.

The Institute is dedicated to the study of modernity in such a transnational and comparative perspective. Its primary emphasis will fall on neglected or under-studied articulations of modernity outside of the historically constituted hegemonic spaces of Europe and the United States, but it will also give serious attention to conflicts and complexities within the West. Inadequate understandings of the complex history of modernity have led to simplistic and untenable positions that unknowingly repeat colonialism’s ideological juxtapositions of “us” and “them,” with modernity (and all the positive connotations of historical progress that accrue to the term) all on one side and inscrutable backwardness all on the other. This results in ghettoized scholarship that is damaging to all.

The standard equation of modernity with the West needs to be problematized and opened up to comparative examination. The Institute hopes to galvanize work in this direction by encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborative research that advances a genuinely global analysis of modernity that is also empirically faithful to geographical and historical specificity. By bringing attention to less frequently studied aesthetic and social practices from non-Western and immigrant communities, the Institute hopes to correct accounts of modernity as primarily Western in origin and dynamics.
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The Institute for Comparative Modernities
PHONE: 607.255.8073 • FAX: 607.254.7244
EMAIL: mek226@cornell.edu

SPRING 2012 EVENTS

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Tuesday 2/7, 4:45 p.m., Shelley Feldman (Professor, Development Sociology; Director, Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Cornell University) and Charles Geisler (Professor, Development Sociology, Cornell University). New Conversations Series.
"Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession as Lived Experience."
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Wednesday 2/29 - 3/1, Daphne Brooks (Professor, English and African American Studies, Princeton University). Lecture Series.
Lecture: "Black Swan(s) Rising: Blues Women, Female Minstrels & the Gendered Politics of Sonic Afromodernity."
Wednesday 2/29, 4:45 p.m.
Seminar: "Sonic Bluesface Culture: Race, Gender & Minstrelsy in High Fidelity."
Thursday 3/1, 10:00 a.m.
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Wednesday 3/28, 4:45 p.m., Dagmawi Woubshet (Assistant Professor, English, Cornell University). New Conversations Series.
"The Feelings of Motherless Children: AIDS Orphans and their Epistles to the Dead."
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Tuesday 4/10, 4:45 p.m., Gerard Aching
(Professor, Romance Studies, Cornell University). New Conversations Series.
"Just War Theory and the Invention of the American Man."
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Wednesday 4/25, 4:45 p.m., Adrienne Davis (Vice Provost; William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law, Washington University). Lecture Series.
"Irregular Intimacies: Polygamy, Race, and the Sexual Politics of Democracy."

PROJECTS OF THE INSTITUTE

2011-12 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

2010-11 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

2009-10 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

ICM NEWSLETTER #1 - SPRING 2009

ICM NEWSLETTER #2 - FALL 2010