Berkhofer Awarded Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin
Dr. Robert Berkhofer, Associate Professor, has been awarded a Friedrich and Lieselotte Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The one year fellowship is given to scholars from other universities working on literary and historical studies of the European Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods up to about the year 1700.
Berkhofer will use his time at the Institute write another book. Based on archival research in Europe, the book will explore the link between forgery and historical consciousness in the Middle Ages. It will use forgeries to examine medieval mentality, which supposed a different relation between text, memory, and the past. The research is informed by recent works on literacy and archival memory, as well as newly emergent theory since the linguistic turn. The overall project is transnational, comparing three major monastic centers of forgery: Saint-Denis, near Paris (France), Christ Church, Canterbury (England), and Saint Peter's, Ghent (Belgium). The resulting book will provide a synthetic understanding of medieval European forgery and historical writing, for which no unified treatment currently exists.