Event Archives

 

May 5, 2008

Papers-in-Progress Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium

 

Interdisciplinary conference at which graduate students present works in progress to their peers for feedback.

 

April 11, 2008

Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion

 

Professor Lynn Enterline
Vanderbilt University

Lynn Enterline is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford University Press, 1995). The author of numerous articles, and holder of several fellowships and awards, Professor Enterline has also served on the editorial board of PMLA and the award committee of the MLA's James Russell Lowell prize. At Vanderbilt and Yale, she has taught Shakespeare, literary theory, Spenser, Milton, Ovid, Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Chaucer, feminism and psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, and 16th and 17th century literature.

 

November 13, 2007

'Fede,' or faith, in Renaissance Context

 

Professor Albert Russell Ascoli
University of California - Berkeley

On Tuesday, November 13th, at 4:00 p.m., in the Texas Governor's Room (Texas Union 3.116), Professor Albert Russell Ascoli will deliver a lecture. Professor Ascoli, Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian at the University of California, Berkeley, will speak on the concept 'Fede,' or faith, in Renaissance context. This lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Department of Italian, the Department of English, Medieval Studies, and the Program in Comparative Literature.

On Tuesday, November 13th, at 4:00 p.m., in the Texas Governor's Room (Texas Union 3.116), Professor Albert Russell Ascoli will deliver a lecture. Professor Ascoli, Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian at the University of California, Berkeley, will speak on the concept 'Fede,' or faith, in Renaissance context. This lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Department of Italian, the Department of English, Medieval Studies, and the Program in Comparative Literature. Professor Ascoli describes his lecture as follows: “The polysemous word-concept, "faith," usually studied in its separate religious, moral, political, economic, legal textual, and other acceptations, constitutes an unusually potent means for examining the subtending ideological structures of early modern Italy, and of European culture more generally, as well as the transformative pressures on these during the sixteenth century. ‘Fede’ is at once the name given to blind trust in unprovable truth and to blind commitment in institutional and personal relationships. It is, in other words, the name explicitly given in this period to the general principle that once shapes the social order, binding individuals to and within it, and effaces what lies, unseen and unsaid, beneath it.” Professor Ascoli is Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian at the University of California, Berkeley. Ascoli, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, studies medieval and early modern culture from the 13th to the 16th centuries, especially in the Italian context. His teaching and research interests include the relations between literary form and history; intertwined configurations of authorship and readership; the construction of Italian national identity from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento; literary politics of gender; and Dante, Machiavelli, and Ariosto. His point of departure is the close, historically and culturally informed, reading of texts, literary and other; these readings, however, frequently give rise to methodological and/or theoretical interrogation of critical practice. His recent published works include Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (edited, with Krystyna Von Henneberg, Berg Press, 2001), and a series of publications on Dante's evolving conceptions of authorship and authority. His book Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

 

February 23, 2007

Distinguished Visiting Lecturer: Professor Paul E. Szarmach

 

Professor Paul E. Szarmach
The Medieval Academy of America

 

February 16, 2007

Animal Feelings and Feelings for Animals in Chaucer

 

Dr. Susan Crane

Faculty Seminar on British Studies

In Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer offers sharp and surprising insights about human relationships with other animals. While it might appear that a little dog, a cock, and a falcon simply help Chaucer to comment on human society, bonds of sympathy between humans and animals reveal a deeper curiosity about animals themselves, and about what kinds of relationships are possible with them.

Rather than seeing animals as sharply different from humans, in line with philosophical thought of his time, Chaucer explores human-animal connections through the commonplace experience of feeling for animals. The Prioress weeps over her pet dogs, the Nun's Priest laments the plight of a vain rooster, and in the Squire's Tale a princess rescues a falcon in distress. What does it mean to pity animals, or to feel compassion for their suffering?

Susan Crane is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her books Insular Romance (1986), Gender and Genre in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1994), and The Performance of Self (2002) discuss feudal thought, chivalry, magic, sexuality, honor, and faith in medieval literature and culture. A book in progress

will ask how medieval people understood animals and their place in creation.

 

November 9, 2007

Prof. A. Ziino speaks on "New sources of late fourteenth-century sacred and secular polyphony"

 

Agostino Ziino
Tor Vegeta

 

October 31, 2006

Call For Papers - Vagantes Conference

 

Call for Papers: Vagantes Graduate Medieval Conference Abstracts due 31 October 2006. Conference held Loyola University Chicago, March 1-4, 2007.

Vagantes is an annual, traveling conference for graduate students studying any aspect of the Middle Ages. The conference was conceived with several goals in mind, including the fostering of a sense of community among graduate medievalists, providing exposure to an interdisciplinary forum, and showcasing the resources of the host institution - all within a student budget.

The sixth conference will be hosted by the medievalists of Loyola University Chicago from March 1-4, 2007. This year's featured speakers will be Barbara Rosenwein, from Loyola University Chicago, and Richard Firth Green, from The Ohio State University.

Abstracts for twenty-minute papers are welcome from graduate students on any topic dealing with the Middle Ages, including areas outside the Latin West.

Papers should strive for significance to a broad medievalist audience.

Please send a brief CV and abstract of no more than 300 words by October 31, 2006 to:

Andrew Donnelly (ajdonnelly@comcast.net) Department of History Loyola
University Chicago
508 Crown Center
6526 N Sheridan Rd.
Chicago, IL 60626
Fax: 773-508-2153

For more information, please visit our website at www.vagantes.org.

 

August 31, 2005

Fall 2005
Classes Begin

 

medieval manuscript image of a dragon