2025 Global Pasts Works-in-Progress Workshop and Awards Program
Global Pasts Works-in-Progress Workshop
As a means of enhancing our scholarly community on campus, the Yan P. Lin Centre’s Research Group on Global Pasts will organize a workshop to showcase ongoing research aligned with the core agenda of our research group. The workshop will consist of a series of short (ca. 20 minute) presentations on individual case studies (texts, events, objects, monuments, etc.) followed by group discussion. We are especially eager to involve graduate students in this workshop and to that end we will offer a series of Global Pasts Awards to support graduate research.
While our 2025-2026 programming is still underway, the overarching theme will be “(re)Sourcing.” How and when does a source becomes a resource and vice versa? This question drives our research agenda for the 2025-2026 academic year. Historical materials—texts, monuments, sites, images—exist as a presence that can be activated, instrumentalized, and transformed into a resource. Paying attention to such movements—sometimes discursive and other times causal—has great potential for enriching our knowledge of the world in various directions: epistemic, ecological, sociopolitical, or religious. This approach is inspired by the directive to follow the “routes” not “roots” of cultural interaction in the premodern world as prompted by anthropologists such as James Clifford and mobilized fruitfully by Art Historian Finbarr Barry Flood.
Our public outreach lecture will be delivered by Finbarr Barry Flood on October 2, 2025 (and we will arrange a more intimate reading group with graduate students to discuss his new book Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms, co-written with Beate Fricke (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2023).
We invite graduate students whose work engages this theme or the broader flows of early globalisms to participate in our second annual Works-in-Progress Workshop in the fall of 2025.
Global Pasts Awards Competition
The Lin Centre’s research group on Global Pasts is pleased to offer an awards competition to support graduate student research that intersects with the core mission of the research group. The awards offer supplemental funding to MA and PhD students over the summer to foster individual research, to be followed by participation in the Global Pasts Works-in-Progress Workshop to be held in the subsequent fall term. Each award is set at a minimum of $1000 per student. Acceptance of the award represents a commitment to participate in 2025 Global Pasts Works-in-Progress Workshop, the date of which will be determined in consultation with the awards recipients.
Eligibility
The awards are intended for current MA or PhD students whose research aligns with the intellectual investments of the Global Pasts research group and who will be enrolled in the fall 2025 semester and on campus to participate in programming, including the Works-in-Progress Workshop.
Application Guidelines
The application consists of a short research proposal of 500 words maximum and a copy of your CV. Proposals should include: (1) a brief description of the case study that you would like to share in the Works-in-Progress Workshop; (2) an explanation of how that case study fits within your broader graduate research agenda (and please specify your primary thesis supervisor); and (3), how that proposed case study fits the mandate of the Global Pasts research group. Note that a budget is not necessary nor are full letters of recommendation. Priority is given to proposals that articulate clear engagement with the intellectual investments of the Global Pasts research group.
Application materials should be addressed and sent by May 15, 2025 to the co-directors of the research group: Professors Cecily Hilsdale (cecily.hilsdale [at] mcgill.ca) and Darian Totten (darian.totten [at] mcgill.ca).