Fall 2025-26 Events
The Medieval Studies Program’s speaker series for 2025-26 is “Border/Crossings.” Our invited guests will each approach the topic of borders, boundaries, and their crossing from a different angle, helping us to consider the fungibility of material borders political, geographical, and otherwise; the oppositions and intersections of Christian and non-Christian communities; the frequent entanglement of families, friends, and enemies; the cleaving of body and soul; the lines that the divide but yet also join art and fashion, utility and beauty, human and divine, trauma and triumphant recovery, and, of course, the medieval and the modern. As a whole, the series speaks to the very meaning of interdisciplinarity, in which border-crossing is a given. Events in this series, generously co-sponsored by multiple campus partners, are marked with an asterisk.
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.
Click here to view the event poster
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, Religious Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and ILS (Integrated Liberal Studies).