The term “Renaissance” is largely taken to identify a period of radical innovation in humanist arts and letters. Though the chronological borders of that period shift from region to region, it is generally a given that the period of time it designates is now closed. But what if the Renaissance is best conceived not as a historical period—closed, finite, defined primarily in terms of distance and difference—but instead as an open historical project? What if the task of the scholar and the teacher, the critic and the poet, the artist and the curator, is to participate in, or even to intervene in, this historical project called the Renaissance?
“The Renaissance Project” is a collective that seeks to cultivate heterogeneous approaches to Renaissance literature and culture across multiple modalities of work. Areas of exploration include:
The relationship between criticism and creative practice
Transhistorical work, temporality, and periodization
How aesthetics can expand our sense of the political.
We pursue these ideas through historically-informed but also experimental research and pedagogical practices, collaboration across institutions, involvement in creative projects and practices informed by art as well as scholarship, and advocacy for the transformative value of historical literatures.