Research Axes

Axis-Based Research at the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies

UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies promotes and sustains transdisciplinary studies of the periods from late antiquity to the early modern era across the globe. Five main research axes structure the polyvalent and multifaceted inquiry of the Center’s diverse faculty. These axes should be understood as generative, not reductive. All research axes remain open to the widest variety of historical and methodological approaches. Proposals that fit more than one axis or offer new frameworks are equally welcome.

Sustainability/Repurposing

This axis traverses work that addresses use, misuse, and reuse in and of the medieval and early modern world, from ideas and goods to texts, objects, and images. Topics may include ecologically informed criticism, interrogations of under- and over-consumption, and (re)production across environmental, economic, political, literary, scientific, and artistic frameworks, including medievalisms.

Fluidity/Permanence

This axis gathers scholarship engaged with materiality and technologies, from sea to city, from buildings to monuments, from remains to relics, from raw materials to goods, from labor to product, and from cognition to the written word and image. Urban, maritime, intellectual, political, and social history, for example, are all part of this axis, as they articulate and negotiate their own stability and periodicity.

Bodies/Performance

Questions of intersectionality are central to early global identity. This axis convenes scholarship that addresses issues of class, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality across pre- and early modern spaces. Work on orality, theater, dance, music, sound studies, the medical humanities, and built environments is fundamental to this axis.

Conversion/Mobility

Early global worlds were rarely static, and the crossing of imaginative and physical borders is a cornerstone of contemporary scholarship on the past. This axis includes research within and across geographical spaces (nations, regions, areas), across faiths and languages, and across economies and laws, as people, things, techniques, texts, and ideas travel and change.

Communication/Archive

The archive, the foundation of early global studies and a veritable technology of memory, is often an argument for a particular view of the past. Language itself is an archive. Early printed books, manuscripts, documents, libraries, and mnemotechnics can also offer space for visions of the future of our disciplines. The archive, whether digital or analog, can elicit an archeology of the long-standing structures that have shaped our scholarship, explicitly and implicitly, and the ways those structures facilitate or preclude communication.