from Medieval Academy News

Global Interconnections: Imagining the World, 500–1500
by Geraldine Heng

In Spring 2002, while meditating on the identity of our medieval studies program at the University of Texas at Austin, I designed a collaboratively-taught mega-seminar for graduate students called Global Interconnections: Imagining the World, 500–1500.

Global Interconnections would be the gateway in a new series of courses under the rubric, The Global Middle Ages, marking the beginning of our attempt to train graduate students to think globally—to develop habits of seeing across civilizations and bodies of knowledge—while also working locally, as intensive disciplinary training in individual departments continues. Simultaneously, we would initiate transdisciplinary graduate training focused through themed courses in a second team-taught series, Medieval Cultural Studies, timing the first course, Love in Western Europe: Literature, Music, Art, to begin at the same time.

Our graduate students already receive excellent training in literatures, languages, history, manuscripts, the fine arts, and cultural theory, but teaching the entire medieval world from Europe to Islamic civilization, from Maghrebi and sub-Saharan Africa to India, and Eurasia to China, I reasoned, would usher students into a globalized, multicultural twenty-first century through state-of-the-art interdisciplinary training, while showing them first hand that globalism and multiculturalism had various forms of medieval existence long before they became twenty-first-century phenomena. I thus optimistically assumed directorship of Medieval Studies in Fall 2002 with new programmatic initiatives that included teaching experiments designed to foster a distinctive group identity for our students in a contracting national academic market.

Global Interconnections was taught in Spring 2004 by five campus faculty from History, English, Middle Eastern Studies, Asian Studies, and Religious Studies, and two visiting faculty who taught segments on Africa and Eurasia. The instructional team had a wide range of specializations: Indian legal codes, temple architecture, Hinduism and caste; Chinese science, technology, and philosophy; European literature and crusade history; gender in Islam and Islamic historiography; the Silk Road, Buddhism, and Mongol Eurasia; Arabic cartography and the kingdoms of Sudanese Africa. Three of us were also well-versed in contemporary critical theory.

To allow the instructors freedom to emphasize themes each individually found most fruitful, I outlined only three broad goals for the seminar: we would study the routes along which people, material artifacts, and ideas moved; examine the similarities and differences among religious, social, legal, and economic systems around the globe; and consider the relationship of “modernity” to “premodernity.”

We would also make an effort to address a set of linked questions: did social organization reproduce itself in ways such that patterns might be traced across warrior and administrative cultures, systems of gender relations, laws and institutions, and built environments around the world? Were there “global feudalisms”—ways of organizing agriculture, external defense and internal order, political hierarchy, and relations to land—that conjointly marked premodern societies? Did cities, states, and civilizations borrow from and imitate far-flung models—communicate—in ways that have yet to be fully understood?

In our teaching focus, the Islamicist and I compared contact zones created by religious wars, travel, and exploration to see how the world functioned as both a series of discrete zones and a network of linked spaces, and examined how collective identities and political communities were formed within and across geographic boundaries. The Africanist emphasized trading linkages and economic networks that spread webs of cultural exchange, story-themes, and ideas in Africa and the Near East; and the Eurasianist tracked technology, money, religion, languages, and populations along the Silk Road from points of embarkation to termini in emporia, cities, and courts. The Indologists explored the social meanings of temple architecture and the caste system and were quizzed on subjects ranging from polytheism to race. We discussed the Koran, the Rg Veda, and the Analects; considered material culture in the form of stirrup and longbow, coins and fabric; and pondered the steel industry in eleventh century China in the context of Western claims of scientific modernity.

From one segment of the syllabus to another, students also persistently raised issues and questions they were interested in following and developing. They were riveted by the spectacle of cultural strategies being repeated and reused across geographical space and time, such as the astonishing resemblance between a utopian Europe depicted by intellectuals in China eager to advance universal Christianity, and on the other hand the “Indian” utopia of Prester John depicted by Christian Europeans eager to do the same, centuries earlier. Inspired seminar teaching was a serendipitous gift: students were enthralled with the segment taught by the medievalist Indologist who was the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

From the first, the collective personality of the class itself was extraordinary. Sixteen students met twice a week for six classroom hours (in a fifteen-week semester) and possessed some seventeen languages among them, but none in common except English. Not only was a spectrum of ancient, medieval, and modern European, Semitic, and Asian languages represented, but the students themselves crossed all racial, national, and ethnic boundaries. They were Caucasian, Asian and Asian American, Arab, Mexican American, African American, Bolivian, and Spanish. Two were not even graduate students, but high-achieving Plan II Honors undergraduates who had been given special permission to enroll. And one student wore hijab.

A seminar culture rapidly coalesced in which no questions or ideas were ever ruled out of bounds. Only half the students were medievalists and, with our global spread, none could claim universal expertise: all the participants quickly learned the value of not fearing to embarrass themselves by asking what might be obvious to others. A fearless, dynamic, and lively intellectual culture thus emerged after the first few classes.

Curiously, students never sat twice in the same place around the seminar table: a response, perhaps, to the continual motion of traveling through an immense array of materials from week to week (the syllabus alone was twenty-one pages long). A more stable routine was the way that Muslim students would disappear to perform their evening prayers during our fifteen-minute seminar breaks.

I began the initiative of scheduling extra discussions outside seminar time to brainstorm knotty questions of disciplinary methods and intellectual traditions that could not be exhausted in class, but students themselves quickly took over, meeting over tea and sushi (and stronger beverages) to brainstorm arguments and readings. They scanned digital texts for one another and shared links and resources. Exchanges flew across the class e-mail list (including an early political firefight between a student who was a Special Forces team leader and two left-leaning students, a quarrel that ended amicably all round).

Unusual graduate projects developed, and two students were invited to deliver papers at a conference in May, which they did to much critical acclaim, with publications, now, to follow. Two more will deliver papers in Fall 2004, and other publications have been commissioned. As I write, a Global Interconnections student is traveling—by camel and boat—to the fourteenth-century Malian capital of Timbuktu in West Africa, to examine the extraordinary manuscript trove there.

Students and faculty alike, I think it fair to say, found this teaching experiment of sustained collaboration incomparably exciting and rich, and unlike any classroom experience we’ve ever known. Many were sorry to have the intellectual adventure end. But in our optimistic moments, we think of Global Interconnections as a model for other collaborative experiments and suspect that the future of the past, in the twenty-first century, can be bright indeed if we can continue to engage, in teams, to teach and learn like this.

Editor’s note: A course description of Global Interconnections, with sample texts and details of faculty who taught it, can be found at the Website of the Medieval Studies Program, University of Texas at Austin (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/medievalstudies/). Geraldine Heng is the author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia, 2003).