Debapriya Sarkar

The 2024 Sharon Harris Book Award

UCHI is honored to announce the winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award for 2024:

headshot of Debapriya Sarkar

Debapriya Sarkar

Associate Professor, English, UConn

for her book

Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Penn Press, 2023)

The Sharon Harris Book Award Committee notesBook cover for Possible Knowledge by Debapriya Sarkar, “Possible Knowledge brilliantly foregrounds literature as an imaginative and epistemological form, re-conceptualizing literary works that remake reality. A work of broad interdisciplinary relevance, it prompts its readers to reconceive the history of science as a history of the imagination by understanding poeisis, literary making, as a philosophical as well as literary endeavor. The result is at the same time a vigorous defense of the importance of imaginative arts for the creation of knowledge and a demonstration of the enduring relevance of the humanities. It will broaden the mind of its readers.”

Honorable mention:

Jason Oliver Chang
Alexis Dudden headshot

Jason Oliver Chang

Associate Professor, History & Director, Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, UConn

and

Alexis Dudden

Professor, History & Asian and Asian American Studies, UConn

for their book

The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom (PM Press, 2023)

Book cover for The Cargo RebellionThe Sharon Harris Award Committee notes, “The Cargo Rebellion is an innovative combination of scholarly research and accessible writing that breaks new ground in reaching young audiences. We felt this engaging translation of intellectual expertise offered a fresh model for humanistic and artist collaboration.”

We thank the award committee for their service. The Sharon Harris Book Award recognizes scholarly depth and intellectual acuity and highlights the importance of humanities scholarship. The 2024 award was open to UConn tenured, tenure-track, emeritus, or in-residence faculty who published a monograph between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2023.

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

The Faculty Success Initiative Presents, Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application, with former UCHI fellows Micki McElya, Debapriya Sarkar, and Anna Ziering. virtual panel discussion. November 2, 2:00pm.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Faculty Success Initiative presents:

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

with Micki McElya (History, UConn)
Debapriya Sarkar (English, UConn)
and Anna Ziering (Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Oglethorpe University)

November 2, 2023, 2:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register

This panel discussion will feature advice from UCHI alums who occupy the ranks of senior faculty, mid career faculty and junior faculty in the humanities who have been successful in writing grant and fellowship proposals. Please be sure to bring along the first page of a draft of your own proposal (even in the very early stages) for workshopping and feedback.

Micki McElya is a professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2021–2022.

Debapriya Sarkar is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2019–2020.

Anna Ziering is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oglethorpe University. She was a UCHI Graduate Research Scholar in 2021–2022.

Seeing Truth Presents: Possible Knowledge with Debapriya Sarkar

Seeing Truth presents Possible Knowledge, a book launch with Debapriya Sarkar, Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies, UConn. March 7, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library. This event will also be livestreamed.

This event will include automated captioning. If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Seeing Truth presents:

Possible Knowledge

A book launch

with Debapriya Sarkar

March 7, 2022,  3:30pm
Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor

This event will also be livestreamed. Register to attend virtually

Debapriya Sarkar will discuss her new book, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Penn Press). Possible Knowledge offers a new account of literature’s role in the intellectual history of early modernity, a period beset by uncertainty as older frameworks of knowledge were questioned, even upended. Showing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, the book argues for early modern literature’s significance as a vital philosophical endeavor. It theorizes “possible knowledge” as a distinct intellectual paradigm, exploring the imaginative habits of thought that enabled early modern thinkers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Bacon, Spenser, and Cavendish—to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we term a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at UConn. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections. Her new book, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. She is the recipient of the Huntington’s 2021–22 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship.

20 Years of Fellows: Debapriya Sarkar

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

headshot of Debapriya Sarkar2019–20 Faculty Fellow Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at UConn. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections. Her current project, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. She is the recipient of the Huntington’s 2021–22 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship.


What was your fellowship project about?
While at the UCHI, I was working my first book, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science. In this project, I study speculative habits of thought—such as hypothesis, conjecture, prophecy, and prediction—that were at the core of Renaissance poetics, fascinating writers from Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare to Milton and Cavendish. I call these ways of thinking “possible knowledge,” and I use them to show how poesie (a general early modern term for literature) helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the so-called Scientific Revolution.

Would you give us an update on the project?

The book is forthcoming from The University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

The fellowship year was instrumental in shaping the final contours of my argument. During my year at the UCHI, I was working through a lot of the conceptual issues that ultimately appear in the book’s introduction. Given that my book studies the relations between literature and science, and engages with the works of historians and philosophers of science, it was extremely helpful to have the chance to discuss these ideas with colleagues in those fields—these discussions helped me to address questions of methodology and audience that have become very important in the final version of the project.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

My favorite memory from the UCHI is definitely the weekly gatherings of the fellows—these events produced so many interesting, and unexpected, exchanges of ideas! I especially recall the serendipitous nature of forming connections across our diverse experiences and interests—both scholarly and beyond—as one of most rewarding and exciting things about my time there.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I am completing the final revisions for my book, and I am starting a new project on the intersections of early modern ecocriticism, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory—in this project, I ask how early modern literary and cultural artifacts can help us think about the long, entangled histories of environmental and racial justice.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

One challenge facing the future of “knowledge” is to confront the significance and scope of the term itself—our understanding of what constitutes knowledge, and what methods are the most appropriate ways of knowledge-production (the so-called objective scientific method, let’s say), are inevitably shaped by our training, our positionality as scholars and students, and the resources available to us. For instance, how might questions in the history of science and environment shift if we centered the insights of Critical Indigenous Studies? I would be interested in thinking through such shifts in our own scholarly practices—to think of knowledges, rather than knowledge as a universal idea. This challenge is, perhaps paradoxically, one of the most exciting things about the topic: as an early modernist, it has been eye-opening to see how the import—and universality—of the term “Scientific Revolution” has been challenged and complicated by scholars working on women’s knowledge practices, Islamic science in the pre-modern period, etc. We thus already have models to rethink the meaning of what constitutes varied bodies of knowledge—by delving into the long, and global histories, of these questions, we can make the future of knowledge(s) as capacious as they have been in the past.