Modernity Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

ABOUT

Isaac Ariail Reed annually hosts and co-conducts “ModSem,” as it is known at the IASC. The seminar began as a reading group during the pandemic that met on zoom, and read so widely as to risk eclecticism: S.N. Eisenstadt, Hannah Arendt, Paul Gilroy, George Steiner, Leo Strauss. It grew from there and has become space for intellectual debate and significant disagreement. We aspire to the true ethos of the seminar, drawing inspiration from the intellectual circles of the past (such as the Geistkreis in Vienna or the Webers’ “sociology evenings” in Heidelberg). In ModSem, complex questions are addressed, difficult texts are examined and re-examined, and the norm is that any question relevant to the issue at hand can be asked.

In its constitution—and indeed in its title—Modernity Seminar is conducted in the context of, as the product of, and yet also apart from the modern university system. We recognize that in the twenty-first century, the university has often become a place dominated by disciplinary specialization and a strongly felt demand, in the human sciences, to synchronize discussion and discipline. Yet both the problems with the contemporary university and the ways in which today’s best thinkers and writers feel frustrated by these problems can themselves be seen as a product of the core contradictions of modernity. And so, we take up the problem of asking what modernity is, how transitions to modernity work, and whether we are currently inhabiting a “late” modernity. In doing so, we pursue the human sciences, a phrase once used to describe inquiry in modern universities before the humanities and social sciences were sundered from each other.

In ModSem at the IASC, the querelle des anciens et des modernes finds its home in the twenty-first century. It is relentlessly intellectual, unapologetically heterodox, and open to all kinds of inquiry about politics, culture, and society. Its core members come from across the human sciences, and they are unified by the pursuit of new answers to a very old question, perhaps best articulated by the Italian polymath Roberto Calasso: what is it to live in the torrent of the modern?

For more information, email Isaac Reed and/or Ohad Reiss-Sorokin.