Monday, March 19th: Workshop with Professor Mary Kate Hurley (English, Ohio University)
4:00 PM, 6191 Helen C. White: Workshop: Speculative World Building in Old English
There is no pre-circulated reading. Please contact Jordan Zweck (jlzweck@wisc.edu) with any questions.
When scholars think about “speculative fiction” and “world building,” they rightly think first of modern genre fiction, of Star Trek and Star Wars, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. In this workshop, we’ll ask ourselves if, by reorienting our ideas about subcreated worlds to focus on time and temporality, we might identify the early stirrings of speculative modes in Old English literature. We’ll begin with a quick history of attempts to define speculative genres, a brief tour of important moments in influential computus texts by Aelfric and Bede, and end with a hands-on exploration of temporality in Old English elegy.
Professor Mary Kate Hurley is an associate professor of medieval literature at Ohio University. She received her MA (2005), MPhil (2008) and PhD (2013) from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Review of English Studies, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Literature Compass, and Postmedieval. Her first monograph, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England was published in the Ohio State University Press Interventions series in July 2021. She has received grants from Wake Forest University, Columbia University, Ohio University, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Whiting Foundation.
This workshop is sponsored by The English Department, The Anonymous Fund, the Medieval Studies Program, and the Department of History.
FRIDAY, APRIL 5: Graduate Association of Medieval Studies (GAMS) annual conference
Details forthcoming.
FRIDAY, APRIL 12: Professor Kristina Olson (Italian, George Mason University)
2 pm, 6191 Helen C. White: Workshop for graduate students and faculty. Please contact Professor Jelena Todorovic (jtodorovic@wisc.edu) for the reading.
5 pm, 6191 Helen C. White: Public lecture: Cowardice is Political: The Legacy of Inferno 3 in 20th- and 21st-Century America
“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” So wrote President John F. Kennedy, believing that he was citing Inferno 3 in his remarks at the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps (June 24, 1963, in Bonn, West Germany). Dante’s idea of cowardice has been appropriated in literary and political discourse through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the American political arena. Olson’s talk aims to connect Dante’s poem with this interpretive afterlife by focusing on the poet’s vision of cowardice as a civic sin, namely as the refusal to act in a time of crisis.
Kristina Olson (PhD, Columbia University, 2006) is an Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. She is the author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and several articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. She is the co-editor of three volumes: Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome (Steerforth Press, 1997); Boccaccio 1313-2013 (Longo Editore, 2015); and Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (second edition) with the Modern Language Association (2020).
Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies (CES), the Department of French and Italian, the Departments of English and History, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Anonymous Fund.
FRIDAY, APRIL 19: Professor Bryan Keene (Art History, Riverside Community College)
2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty. Please contact Professor Thomas Dale (tedale@wisc.edu) for the reading.
5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public lecture: Queer Medievalisms in Contemporary Art
The art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe has inspired creators of the LGBTQIA2+ communities in North America for decades. Themes of religion, the body, disease, and human relationships under the law are as urgent now as they were in the past. This talk examines dialogues between historical objects made from about 500-1600 with contemporary art from the 1980s to today with the goal of expanding ideas about gender and sexuality across time and understanding the draw queer- and trans-identifying creators today have with these time periods.
The diversity of queer and trans artists included emphasizes intersectionality, that is, how individuals, especially those who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) or with multiple intersecting identities of (dis)ability, class, gender, race, religion, and sexuality face marginalization, prejudice, and discrimination. Some of the narratives related to HIV/AIDS and hate crimes are painful and may be triggering. Stories of coming out and pride offer hope for a future of care, inclusion, and justice.
LGBTQIA2+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, Two-Spirit, and those with other gender expansive identities and individuals who are sexually fluid. In this proposal, the word “queer” encompasses artists who identify as LGBTQIA2+.
Bryan C. Keene teaches art history at Riverside City College, where he specializes in Italian manuscript illumination and the global Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the nexus of Afro-Eurasian book culture, portable objects, and materials. Previously a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, his exhibition credits include The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds, co-authored with Larisa Grollemond (2022); Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts(2019); and Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art, co-curated with Kirsten Collins (2019).
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Art History and History, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Anonymous Fund.