September 26 to 28, 2019

An International Conference at the Oakley Center of Williams College

Is it time to reassess comparison as an intellectual tool? Rather than normative prescriptions, this conference seeks to offer historical perspectives. Drawing on the study of humanistic traditions from across the globe in the era before 1800, it aims to assess the many ways comparison has served in human history. The focus on the premodern period reveals an archive of intellectual experiences and configurations alternative to those wrought by modern Western hegemony in the nineteenth century and after. Through a series of focused case studies, scholars of different stripes will ask: what forms of analogy and of distinction did past thinkers and writers employ, and what kinds of comparisons did these enable? How did these intellectual moves facilitate the transmission of classical texts, religion, or ideas from one context to another? What did they preclude? And what potential comparisons, moreover, were thinkers of the past unable to see or to make?

The conference will bring together eleven established scholars from across the humanities to share their research. The scholars in question, leaders in their respective fields, all work on textual traditions in different languages and regions of the world. The conference will afford these researchers an opportunity to put their work in conversation around the cross-cultural history of comparison from the ancient world to today. The hope is that the premodern global archive of intellectual history can offer new possibilities for our global present.

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The Global Archive of Comparison is sponsored by the Oakley Center and the History Department at Williams College, with additional support from Comparative Literature, the Graduate Program in the History of Art, Religion, Special Collections, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.