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The Textual Studies Program is an interdisciplinary graduate program in the Humanities, the Arts, Architecture, Education, Law and Information Science. It draws on the expertise of nearly 60 UW faculty, librarians, staff members as well as distinguished visitors from other institutions to provide students with a foundation for professional, multidisciplinary study of literary, historical, artistic, architectural, legal and electronic works. The program's core courses are designed to give students comprehensive knowledge of oral, handwritten, printed and electronic texts, and acquaint them with major theories and practices of textual editing. All interested graduate students and upper-division undergraduates may enroll in Textual Studies courses. In addition, doctoral candidates in any UW program may pursue a Ph.D. program option in Textual Studies while they are completing graduate work in their own departments if they fulfil the requirements outlined below (see below, Section 4). Upon completion of their studies, their transcript will show that they have completed, e.g., a Ph.D. in History and Textual Studies. Since its inception in Winter 1998 until the present, the Textual Studies Program has been housed in and supported by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. The Center's philosophy, however, is not to house programs on a long-term basis in order to be able to respond to new initiatives. For this reason in Fall 2002, the Textual Studies program will be moved to the Department of Comparative Literature. At its meeting of November 16, the faculty of the Comparative Literature department voted unanimously in favor of transferring the program to this unit. Our long-term plan is to develop an independent Center for Textual Studies jointly supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Information School. This will depend in large measure on the outcome of this review, which will be the first review of the program, the development of an undergraduate program in Textual Studies (see section 13), and not least of all, acquiring a secure source of funding and staff support.
Research in all disciplines concerned with human culture and institutions, from language and literature to architecture and the law, depends in a fundamental way on texts-- documents and material representations that embody and transmit the ideas, values, assumptions and historically shared forms of communal life. Hence the centrality of libraries, archives, museums and other collections of documents and artifacts: they are, in a material way, our history. Whether the focus is a reproducible text of a plays by Shakespeare, the blueprints of historical buildings, the diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci, or legal statutes and documents, virtually every discipline in the humanities, arts and social sciences depends on--and frequently takes for granted--the texts that are the primary materials of research and form the content of our courses. And yet most of our curricular offerings do not encourage reflection on texts, on how they come into existence, are edited, published and altered in the process of transmission from one medium (or time or culture) to another. The primary goal of the Textual Studies program is to develop a much needed awareness among our faculty and students that texts are not pristine, ahistorical objects; that they suffer alteration through use, decay or editorial tampering; that they are problematic records of authorial intentions or historical meanings; and that the varying forms of texts are as important as, indeed cannot be separated from the message they convey. We believe that knowledge generated by a Textual Studies program is so fundamental that it cannot be introduced too early into our curriculum, as it develops in students a healthy skepticism about the presumed authoritative status of texts and critical abilities to perceive the artifice behind apparently "natural" or inevitable social structures. The knowledge that texts have a history of creation, transmission and transformation is crucial to any engagement with the less visible, but no less pervasive, presence of all forms of material and intellectual culture--from the visual and performing arts, to architecture, to the construction of social strata and gender distinctions. Our mission, therefore, is none other that the mission of all disciplines: to teach students how to "read" creatively rather than be dominated by the manifold texts which inexorably shape our experience, but to do so from the vantage point of an investigation of the very foundation of that experience. It is our sense (and we have watched it happen in our classes) that exposure of students to Textual Studies even in a single course has transformative effects and leads to enlightenment. Students learn not to take texts for granted, find out how they were edited, in how many versions they appear and what interpretative issues each version poses. Our primary mission then is to reach as many students as possible by continuing to offer the Textual Studies core seminars on a regular basis and encourage faculty to redesign their courses to include a textual studies angle. Second, we wish to put in place an undergraduate minor in Textual Studies through a sequence of interdisciplinary courses that will redefine the concept of a liberal arts education at this institution. Third, we want to build closer ties between our diverse faculty from six schools and colleges on our campus; secure recruitment funds, including travel and research support for students taking the Ph.D. program option in Textual Studies; and maintain the national and international visibility of our program by inviting distinguished visitors to participate in our courses and give public lectures. We will consider ourselves successful when Textual Studies will eventually be taught at all levels, in many departments and create new contexts for faculty and students from disciplines as diverse as literature, art, architecture, education, law and information science to converge on shared concerns about the issues facing the constitution and dissemination of texts in our time and the challenges of the newest technologies to the world's oldest endeavor: the care, maintenance, storage and preservation of texts.
Textual Studies is the oldest discipline dealing with the production, maintenance, preservation, and transmission of texts. Its concerns, both conceptual and historical, stand at the core of the liberal arts and of human culture. The critical study of texts goes back at least to the sixth-century BC Athenian attempts to halt the corruption of the Homeric poems, and to the rival libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum in the third century BC. In its complex evolution from oral to handwritten, handwritten to printed, and, in our own day, printed to electronic texts, the field has encompassed a variety of interests which include: systems of communication in oral cultures; the composition of manuscripts; the history of the book; principles of editing and textual criticism; revisions of literary works, and their adaptation in, for example, film; evolving legal definitions of authorship, intellectual property, and copyright; the restoration of paintings, historic buildings and monuments; and, especially in recent years, the impact of electronic media on the production and dissemination of texts. What unites all these facets of Textual Studies is the recognition that texts bear the imprint of their creation, production, duplication and reception in different cultures and by various audiences; that acts of copying, editing and restoration are fraught with errors; that written works often stem from oral traditions they misrepresent; and that every technological innovation affects the transmission of texts in a fundamental way. From its very inception textual scholarship has provoked many controversies and lively debates, and to this day it has remained one of the most contentious fields of inquiry that frequently generates veritable scandals. This is a discipline in which interpretative decisions about the proper transcription of a single word are taken very seriously, and where the pressure on editors to produce the "right" text verges on ethical responsibilities of the gravest consequence. For example, the controversy over the continuation or cessation of the cruel practice of Sati burnings in India centered on the interpretation of a single character in a word from a Vedic text. The case is no different in music or art history. When James Beck, professor of art history at Columbia, was sued by the Italian government for opposing the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel and threatened with three or four years in jail under Italian law, his only "crime" was a textual one. For Beck, as for many contemporary editors, a work does not exist in an originary moment whose purity must be captured, but in its transmission and history which includes decay, the soot and not just its former pristine glamour. This case depicts what still remains today one of the many decisions scholars must face when editing and re-editing texts: whether to produce an ideal text, or "best text" that reflects the author's intentions, or focus instead on the transmission of a text, which then becomes primarily the history of its compilers and readers, and of the culture to which they belong.
The Program offers doctoral certification in the field of Textual Studies as a complement to a Ph.D. in another program at the University of Washington. To be admitted to the Textual Studies Program, a candidate must be: currently enrolled and in good standing in a Ph.D. program at the UW. Formal application to Textual Studies requires a letter stating the student's educational background, his or her specific interests in Textual Studies, and two letters of recommendation. After these materials have been reviewed by the program Director(s), the applicant will be informed in writing regarding his/her admission to the Program. Upon admission to the Program, a doctoral candidate obtains certification in Textual Studies by completing, in addition to existing requirements for the original Ph.D., a total of 30 credit hours in Textual Studies. These include the four interdisciplinary courses of the Textual Studies Program:
The remaining ten seminar credits will be obtained in approved courses offered by participating units. In addition, the candidate shall provide evidence of formal participation in Textual Studies, either as an active member of a Textual Studies research group or by completing a Ph.D. dissertation on a topic connected with textual research and scholarship. Before advancing to dissertation work, the student will demonstrate his or her general knowledge of the field of Textual Studies by completing an examination or writing a critical essay on an assigned topic. A student's Ph.D. supervisory committee shall include at least one member of the Textual Studies Faculty. For more information on courses, including syllabi from past course offerings, see the Courses page.
History of the Textual Studies Program Recognizing that many UW distinguished faculty with significant expertise in Textual Studies were conducting their research in isolation and with few students in common, Raimonda Modiano and Míceál Vaughan circulated a proposal in Fall 1995, outlining the importance of establishing an interdisciplinary graduate textual studies program at the UW. The enthusiastic response we received to the proposal was reported to the Graduate School which subsequently appointed an interdisciplinary Committee on Textual Studies "devoted to collaborative research and study of the theories and practices governing the production, publication, transmission, preservation, and editing of texts"(Graduate School Mandate of December 20, 1995). The Committee included the following members: Raimonda Modiano (English) (committee chair); Ernst Behler (Comparative Literature); Jack Haney (Slavic Languages and Literature); Stephen Jaeger (Germanics); Martin Jaffee (Jewish Studies; Comparative Religion); Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak (Near Eastern Languages and Civilization); Sandra Kroupa (Book Arts Librarian); Thomas Lockwood (English); Pierre Mackay (Classics; Near Eastern; Comparative Literature); Richard Salomon (Asian Languages and Literature); Robert Stacey (History); Míceál Vaughan (English); Helene Williams (Reference Librarian); and Jack Wolcott (Drama). From 1995 to the present, the Graduate School Interdisciplinary Committee has remained the governing executive body of the Textual Studies program, initiating, authorizing and reviewing all actions pertaining to the establishment, maintenance and funding of the program. Between 1995 and 1997, it launched three initiatives: 1. the appointment of a Textual Studies Curriculum Committee (Martin Jaffee [chair]; Michael Halleran [Classics]; Tom Lockwood [English], William Streitberger [English]; Sandra Kroupa [Library]; Collett Cox [Asian Languages and Literature]) charged with the task of designing the core courses for the prospective program; 2. the establishment of a Textual Studies Research Group, funded by the Center for the Humanities, comprised of 26 members, including UW faculty and students from various departments and 3 faculty from Pacific Lutheran University and the University of the Puget Sound; 3. the organization of a large scale inaugural international conference in Textual Studies (Voice, Text and Hypertext at the Millennium) with 50 distinguished speakers from the U.S., Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, England, France, Russia and Scotland. The conference addressed topics ranging from Buddhist manuscripts of the first century and sacred Sanskrit texts to Czech underground literature, the editing of medical texts, hypertext and digital culture. Its speakers included Roger Chartier, the leading historian of post-medieval culture in the world; Nancy Siraisi, one of the top scholars in the history of medicine and science; and Ludo Rocher, renowned scholar of Sanskrit, Indology and classical Indian culture. According to plan, in January 1997, the University of Washington Curriculum Committee approved the four core courses for the new Graduate Program in Textual Studies. This action was followed by a formal request to the Graduate Council on May 1st, 1997 for the approval of the Textual Studies Program, which was granted in June 1997. In Fall of 1997 (October 29 to November 1), the sensational conference in Textual Studies took place, which inaugurated the program. Following the conference, the core course sequence began in Winter and Spring 1998. Since then two of the four core course for the program have been offered regularly each year. Our goal has been to make it possible for students interested in fulfilling the requirements for the Ph.D. option in Textual Studies to complete the program's main requirements within two years.
The Textual Studies's Program's Unique Status In his opening remarks to a public lecture delivered on January 30, 2002, Dick Van Vliet, who, for at least twenty years has been at the center of the most important editorial enterprises taking place in Holland and Europe, stated that the Textual Studies Program at the University of Washington is unique in the world. We share this view for several reasons which we outline below: 1. The philosophy guiding our program has been from the very inception to establish a broadly interdisciplinary set of courses whose ultimate aim is enlightenment rather than vocational training, i.e. the knowledge that the texts upon which all disciplines depend are unstable and come with a history of transmission, alteration and reception that is crucial to our understanding of what they mean. We are not inclined to establish Textual Studies as a self-contained M.A. and Ph.D. but as a complementary track within a graduate (and in the future undergraduate) degree whose main focus remains in an existing discipline. This is primarily because we conceive of Textual Studies as a metadiscipline which can merge with and influence any discipline that depends on access to texts, documents, and artifacts. 2. We are unaware of any other program in the country that defines its goals beyond the standard confines of the History of the Book, Textual Criticism, Bibliography and Editing. In recent years a number of universities have begun to develop programs centered in Textual Studies, such as, for example, at Boston University's Editorial Institute(M.A. and Ph.D.), the University of Iowa's Center for the Book (graduate certificate in Book Studies), Simon Fraser University (M.A. in Print Culture 1700-1900), University of Texas, Austin (M.A. and Ph.D. concentration in Bibliography and Textual Criticism), and a similarly oriented M.A. in "Humanities Computing" at the University of Virginia. The Institute of English Studies at the University of London offers an M.A. in the History of the Book and the University of Toronto hosts a collaborative program at the M.A and Ph.D. levels in Book History and Print Culture. Other institutions have research centers in this field or offer joint-listed courses, workshops, seminars and lecture series without degrees (e.g., Edinburgh University, Library of Congress, American Antiquarian Society, Cambridge University, University of Minnesota, Oxford University, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University). Only Britain's University of Reading has a full range of undergraduate and graduate courses, offering degrees from B.A. to Ph.D. in its department of "Typography and Graphic Communication." The programs at Reading and Toronto underscore the special character of the UW's program. Both programs are much more narrowly focused than ours. Furthermore, while Arts Schools and Communications programs in various places offer courses and degrees in Book Arts, such programs are geared to practical or vocational training. By contrast the UW's program is firmly located at the center of a liberal arts education and examines its theoretical and methodological foundations. 3. The defining features of our program are its interdisciplinary reach and methodological breadth. We extend the history of the book to the present and future world of electronic texts, but are also concerned to show how, for instance, the principles of textual editing apply to the history of Chartres Cathedral, Rembrandt's paintings, and Shakespeare's London. Where other programs may focus on, say, the book as physical object, or on bibliographic training and research, our program is committed to taking the idea of "text" beyond manuscript, printed, and electronic books to a range of historical artifacts by which humans structure meaning, express ideas and communicate values. We are also interested in texts as intellectual property, and in the ways texts are produced, transmitted, received and preserved in societies ancient and modern. 4. Within the campus community, the Textual Studies program offers unique opportunities for students and faculty to get to know colleagues from other departments and distinguished scholars from other institutions. As pointed out in the History of Core Seminars section, these are anything but ordinary classes. Visitors are often invited for several days, giving students ample access to them. The seminars are festive occasions, accompanied by receptions, dinners, parties, walks which are very demanding on the time of seminar leader, but which secure for students ties among themselves and prominent visitors who have a significant impact on their professional future. Without the visit of speakers such as David Greetham, a leading textual studies theorist and chief organizer of the conferences of the Society of Textual Scholarship, it is doubtful that students would have been able to present papers on their own at the 2001 conference in a forum devoted to the University of Washington Program.
By any objective measures, Textual Studies at the University of Washington offers a unique and original program of graduate (and, potentially, undergraduate) study. Claiming as its field established scholarly disciplines in historical and literary studies such as paleography, codicology and textual criticism, the program has from its origin emphasized the methodological and theoretical components that underlie the analysis and understanding of what we ordinarily think of as "texts," words ordered in meaningful patterns. And because words are multivalent in their manner of communicating meaning, textual study requires appreciation of content and form, of meaning and design, of historical performance and current reception. Since words exist in both oral and written forms, and can be preserved and transmitted in varied languages and media, textual studies provide fundamental critical tools relevant to almost all aspects of human culture. It does not take much expansion of the meaning of "text," however, to embrace human artifacts produced for the transmission of ideas and cultural values that depend on semiotic systems other than the alphabetic or pictographic representations of the world’s many languages. Consequently, our program has expanded the notion of "text" to include, for instance, music, architecture and the visual arts. Because of the important ways in which texts function and circulate in human societies, textual studies will also impinge on, and be informed by, disciplines such as those of law, education, communications, and information science. Questions regarding intellectual property and copyright, for instance, raise crucial legal and ethical issues; and evolving concerns with defining, and assessing, literacy in our modern, technologically advanced society informs efforts to improve pedagogy and communications. Textual Studies requires involvement, therefore, in many areas of established disciplinary study beyond the confines of the fields of literary and historical studies, fields from which the program originated. From its inception, Textual Studies at the UW has been intentionally multidisciplinary, involving faculty in many diverse units. Faculty and units participating in Textual Studies now include six schools and colleges on campus: Architecture and Urban Planning, Arts and Sciences, Education, Engineering, Information, and Law. The Program stands poised, therefore, to assert a claim to having a foundational or metadisciplinary status in those fields involving the preservation and transmission of human culture. This claim is already being made in developments within our core seminars for the graduate program, and in the interaction among faculty that has been occurred in the context of the seminars and associated public lectures.
International and National Recognition The University of Washington is the home of an impressively large group of junior and senior scholars in many departments who have attained genuine distinction in diverse areas of Textual Studies: in oral and scribal culture (e.g. Patricia Conroy [Scandinavian], Martin Jaffee, [The Jackson School], Susanne Petersen [Spanish], Paul Remley [English], Richard Salomon [Asian], Robert Stacey [History]); in the visual and monumental arts (Cynthea Bogel, Jeffrey Collins, Anna Kartsonis and Christine Goettler [Art History]; Alex Anderson and Jeffrey Ochsner [Architecture]); in early printed books (Sandra Kroupa [UW Libraries], William Streitberger and Thomas Lockwood [English]) and digital texts (Terry Brooks and David Levy [Information School], Geoffrey Sauer [Technical Communication]), in literary and (hyper)textual theory (George Dillon and Leroy Searle [English]) and the law (Robert Aronson, Katherine O'Neill). Richard Salomon and Collett Cox (Asian) have earned international recognition for their identification of the earliest (1st century AD) Buddhist texts, whose importance for Buddhist culture is comparable to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism and early Christianity. George Bozarth (Music History) and Lockwood (English) are collaborating with colleagues in international editions of the works of Johannes Brahms and Henry Fielding, respectively. Some indication of the international appeal of our Program can be judged from the extraordinary range and distinction of the participants in the Inaugural Conference in 1997 and from the number of internationally recognized scholars we succeeded in attracting to our seminars. Many of the latter also presented well-attended lectures. See the Visiting Scholars page for more information. |
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©
2005 Textual
Studies Program at the University
of Washington Webmaster: Matthew James Vechinski Please contact us if you experience any problems using this site. |
