UC, Riverside & "The Disorder of Things"

A friend just informed me about this multi-year event at UC, Riverside. Check out the link here. It really looks like an amazing series of conferences and symposia.

Here's an excerpt from their site describing the project:

"The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge 1660-1850" is an international research network led by the University of California, Riverside and Birkbeck, University of London. Over two years the network will meet with scholars from a wide range of disciplines to discuss pre-disciplinary forms of knowledge through cultural practices, sites, texts, and objects, from 1660-1850. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches have provided creative impetus for rethinking our fields in recent years. While twenty-first century discussions of disciplinarity are often presentist in their relative neglect of historical shifts, narratives of the emergence of disciplines tend to establish teleologies of increasing professionalization, which appear to lead inexorably to our present configurations. Drawing on these well established academic critiques of the rise of disciplinarity and of current disciplinary crises, we will shift the ground of debate to a longer time frame and a wider scope in order to generate new insights into what may seem like teleological dead ends or inevitabilities today.