FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24: Professor Amy Hollywood (Harvard Divinity School)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty on “Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Theology: Jane Eyre and the Psalms“. Please contact Professor Adam Stern for the reading – adam.stern@wisc.edu
5 pm, Elvehjem L140: A Public Talk: “Reading and the Power of Affect: Cassian and Foucault“.
The paper argues that Foucault’s account of John Cassian’s (d. ca. 435) Conferences and their impact on later monasticism, focusing as it does on the centrality of obedience and humility, misses a crucial opportunity congruent with Foucault’s own desire to think about practices of self-transformation. Central to the Conferences, I argue, is Cassian’s account of reading and prayer, both understood as transfigurative processes through which the monk comes, not to sacrifice himself simply for the sake of sacrifice, as Foucault argues, but to experience the full range of human affect, foremost among them love.
Amy Hollywood joined HDS in 2005. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife (1995), which received the Otto Grundler Prize, Sensible Ecstasy (2002), and Acute Melancholia and Other Essays (2016). She has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012) and the special issue The Poetics of Prayer and Devotion to Literature (2021). Her most recent book, Devotion: Three Inquiries on Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination (with Constance Furey and Sarah Hammerschlag), was published in 2021. Her current work spans philosophy of religion, religion and literature, and feminist and gender studies.
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Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, Religious Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and ILS (Integrated Liberal Studies).
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3: Professor Andrea Denny-Brown (University of California – Riverside)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty on “Gaudiness as technique” (article). Please contact Professor Lisa Cooper for the reading – lhcooper@wisc.edu
5 pm, Elvehjem L140: A Public Talk: “Bordered and Bespoke: African, Asian, and European Entanglements in the Silk Objects of Walé Oyéjidé and Geoffrey Chaucer”.
This talk will explore the entangled medieval histories offered by the silk textile collection of contemporary designer Walé Oyéjidé and his fashion label Ikiré Jones. Oyéjidé’s “Remastering the Old World” silk textile series creates an alternative history centered on combining medieval and renaissance European artworks with African prints and images of African royalty, in order to pose questions about the possibility of a “shared” fashion narrative that crosses national, racial, religious, and even temporal borders. Using Oyéjidé’s work as a guide, I will consider the storytelling legacies of the silk textiles in late medieval Europe. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Trojan romance Troilus and Criseyde, I argue, represents a moment when overtly exoticized silk fashions in crusader romances give way to more refined literary and visual citations based in an emerging perception of discerning European taste. Looking at this narrative through Oyéjidé’s vision, we can see one cultural mechanism by which past aesthetics came not to be shared.
Andrea Denny-Brown, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, is a specialist in the poetry and material culture of the European Middle Ages. She is the author of Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High– and Late–Medieval England (2012) and the co-editor, with Lisa H. Cooper, of Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (2008) and The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (2014). She served as guest editor for a double issue of the journal Exemplaria on “The Provocative Fifteenth Century” (2017-18), and as editor of the same journal from 2018-2021. Her current book project, Criminal Ornament: Maligned Style & the Fifteenth Century, studies interdisciplinary techniques of ornament in late medieval verbal, visual, and decorative arts and the backlash against such ornament in the early twentieth century.
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Co-sponsored by The Art History Department, The Anonymous Fund, English, the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture, Art, ILS, and European Studies.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18: Medieval Studies Welcome Back Happy Hour
Time: 4 pm CST (US and Canada)
Place: Memorial Union Terrace (for faculty, staff, and graduate students)
Come reconnect with colleagues, meet new members of our community, and enjoy a relaxed start to the semester overlooking the lake. We look forward to seeing you there!
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12: The 4th Annual Medieval Studies/IRH Mashup.
4pm University Club Room 212
Research presentations:
Maya Soifer Irish (Associate Professor of History, Rice University; IRH Kingdon Fellow): “Ferrán Martínez’s Antisemitic Preaching and the Late Medieval ‘Popular Bible”.
Grace Delmolino (Assistant Professor of Italian, UC Davis; IRH Solmsen Fellow): “Medieval Consent”.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities