Brauer Seminar

Established by friends of the Divinity School to encourage interdisciplinary teaching and research, the Jerald Brauer Seminar is co-taught periodically by two or three Divinity School faculty members. 

The topic changes according to the instructors' interests. Up to 10 students may participate with the instructors' consent, and each student receives a stipend to support their participation. A seminar budget covers the honorarium and travel expenses for the Brauer Fellow, a visiting scholar who represents a disciplinary perspective on the seminar topic that complements the instructors'.  

Jerald Brauer was Dean of the Divinity School from 1955 to 1970. An authority on Puritanism and the history of Christianity in America, he served on the school's faculty for 49 years, from 1950 until his death, and wrote and edited numerous books. Although he officially retired in 1991, he continued to teach a seminar on Christian history each semester.

 

The Autumn 2026 Brauer Seminar, "Settler, Scholar, Soldier, Scribe: Knowledge and Power in the Early Modern World," will be co-taught by Professors Kirsten Macfarlane and Anand Venkatkrishnan.

The spread of global empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided the material and political conditions for the intellectual developments of the early modern world. These developments included: a sense of novelty and experimentation, the rise of vernacular and lay learning, new forms of historicity, critical questioning of received traditions and sources of authorities, and creative re-imaginings of social norms and customs. Many of these developments are today viewed as critical to the formation of modernity. Nearly all of them were underwritten by imperial conquest and the concomitant world-systems of race, caste, and religion. This seminar explores the entanglements of knowledge and power across the early modern world. Readings focus on taxonomic traditions, histories of science, missionary and military systems of knowledge, mobility and migration, and ethical self-formation.