Topic Director: Jennifer Ponce de León
Associate Professor of English

From ancient to modern contexts, colonialism and imperialism have never been solely economic and military endeavors. They entail practices of domination, subversion, accommodation, and invention in the realms of culture and ideology. Indeed, the importance of culture as a field of social struggle comes into particularly sharp relief when considering the history of empire: from the use of religion and philosophy to legitimize and critique imperial formations, to the weaponization of culture as a form of soft power, to the important role of culture in many forms of resistance, negotiation, and reinterpretation that have emerged within and against imperial rule.

Across diverse imperial formations—including but not limited to European colonial empires—culture has been central both to governance and to contestation. In different historical contexts, institutions of knowledge—from courts, temples, and scribal traditions to modern universities—have been implicated in imperial expansion and administration. At the same time, important intellectual traditions, as well as new literary, artistic, and musical forms, have often emerged from opposition to, or reworking of, imperial power. Attention to the ways that empire has shaped the production and circulation of knowledge has enabled major conceptual and methodological developments across the humanities, while also prompting reflection on the role of cultural institutions and intellectual labor in sustaining or challenging systems of power. Such reflections remain crucial, as struggles over knowledge have long been entangled with broader social, political, and material conflicts across different historical periods.

Imperial and colonial practices—including conquest, enslavement, dispossession, and exploitation—have been produced and enabled by a wide range of hierarchizing ideologies. These include, in different times and places, racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and civilizational distinctions, often articulated in relation to gender and sexuality. Such ideologies have been the subject of profound critique and have been countered through diverse forms of resistance, from organized political movements to religious transformation, intellectual dissent, and everyday practices of adaptation and persistence. Nonetheless, imperial logics often persist as unacknowledged substrates of policies, institutions, and discourses. This is seen, for instance, in hierarchies of value that mediate the interpretation of culture, attributing some with universal significance, while relegating others to particular or marginal status, and consigning some to the dustbin of history. Institutions such as courts, archives, temples, museums, universities, and cultural industries have been key sites where such hierarchies are both reproduced but also contested. At the same time, alternative practices and forms of knowledge-making frequently emerge outside formal institutions, including those interwoven with the grammar of everyday life.

While the forms and logics of empire have varied significantly across time and place, the history of empire has left its mark on societies across the globe, shaping processes of socioeconomic and cultural development, and the movement of people, commodities, and ideas. Empire has also often imperiled life across the planet through militarism, poverty, displacement, genocide, and ecological destruction. For these reasons and many more, the analysis of empire is not only a central scholarly endeavor; it  has also long been at the core of political debates and collective struggles over the past, present, and future.

We invite you to join the Wolf Humanities Center in this endeavor to examine empire in concrete and materialist—rather than abstract or metaphorical—manner. Our investigations will be open to any facet of empire, including histories of struggles against imperialism and colonialism, and to any geographical region or time period.

Jennifer Ponce de León, Topic Director, Wolf Humanities Center
Ayako Kano, Director, Wolf Humanities Center
May 2026