GW MEMSI

Ben Tilghman Lunch Seminar

2011-12-14T23:41:00.005-05:00

On Friday January 27th at 12 PM, MEMSI will host Ben Tilghman, Professional Lecturer of Art History at GW. Lunch will be served. The event takes place in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW). His paper, "The Enigmatic Nature of Things," will be available two weeks in advance. Please email Lowell Duckert [lduckert@gwu.edu] to RSVP for the event and receive a copy.

Ben Tilghman’s research focuses on the art of medieval Europe, especially illuminated manuscripts and the early medieval British Isles. He is particularly interested in the symbolic aspects of ornament, the visual nature of writing, cross-cultural interchange in the North Sea basin, and phenomenological and object-oriented analyses of art. He has recently published essays in Word & Image and in the volume Insular and Anglo-Saxon: Art and Thought in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Colum Hourihane, and also has forthcoming essays in Manuscripta and The Journal of the Walters Art Museum. Before coming to GW, he previously served as the Zanvyl Krieger Curatorial Fellow at the Walters Art Museum, where he curated exhibitions on miniaturization in books and art, the Saint John’s Bible, and images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ecological Movement

2011-12-11T23:40:00.028-05:00

GW MEMSI and the Graduate Program in English are pleased to announce "Ecological Movement," a panel to be held at GW next semester.

Come join us on Friday February 24th at 5:30 PM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW).

Our presenters cut across time periods and disciplines. Each will give a short paper, with a general Q&A to follow. Speakers include:

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she has won several teaching awards and has served as co-chair of the University's Sustainability Committee. Her primary interests are the environmental humanities, animal studies, posthumanism, science studies, new materialism, gender theory, cultural studies, and multicultural American literatures. She has published two books recently: Material Feminisms (edited with Susan J. Hekman, 2008) and Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). A book entitled Sea Creatures and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics is currently in the works. Please see her research page for more information.

Lowell Duckert is a doctoral candidate in the GW English program, finishing his dissertation on early modern waterscapes, actor-network theory, and ecocriticism. He has forthcoming articles on glaciers, the color maroon, rain, and Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana. Along with Jeffrey Cohen, he is editing a special issue of the journal postmedieval titled "Ecomateriality."

Jennifer James, Associate Professor of English and Director of African Studies Program at GW, specializes in African American literature and culture, with a concentration in the 19th century. She has a particular interest in theorizing the relationships among literary praxis, representations of blackness, and sociopolitical violence. She is working on two projects: Black Jack: Andrew Jackson and African American Cultural Memory, which traces the history three generations of ancestors enslaved by the President, and a cultural history of a little-known labor riot staged by black American miners during the “nadir.” A short list of her scholarship includes: “What Guano is Made of: Race, Labor and Sustainability ” (forthcoming, special topic issue of American Literary History on sustainability and American literature) and “Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War, and Black Ecological Imaginings” in Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century (eds. Stephanie LeMenager, et. al., 2011).

Eileen Joy is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her main interests are Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, ethics, and the post/human. She has published on many topics: Beowulf, suicide terrorism, and Emmanuel Levinas; historical artifacts and cultural memory; the Anglo-Latin Wonders of the East and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; the intellectual history of early modern bibliography; and much more. She is the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook (2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (2007), and postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Her current research/writing project is on the Anglo-Latin and Old English Lives of Saint Guthlac and the queer erotics of unsettled inter-subjectivities, along with a monograph tentatively titled Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History. You can also find her blogging on In the Middle and organizing future events for the BABEL Working Group.

GW Today Interviews Professor Holly Dugan

2011-12-04T16:03:00.004-05:00

The Memory of Smell

In her new book, Assistant Professor of English Holly Dugan investigates the influence of olfaction in early modern England.

Nov. 7, 2011

By Julia Parmley

The scent of mothballs and wet concrete may not be the most glamorous of smells.

But for Assistant Professor of English Holly Dugan, they conjure powerful, poignant memories of her late grandmother.

“I think we’re hard wired to associate smell with memory,” she said. “Smell is one of the most direct and unmediated sensory mechanisms.”

The memory of smell—and its role in everyday life—is a topic Dr. Dugan delves into in her new book “The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England.”

The book looks at six scents—incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris and jasmine—and their role in important cultural spaces of the time period, including churches, royal courts and pleasure gardens. For Dr. Dugan, the point of The Ephemeral History is to show what smell can reveal about life back then and how it hints at changes to come.

“Perfume is such a loaded object of study because we have so many assumptions about what it is, how it functions and who uses it,” she said. “It was fun to look back and see that before it was a commodity, it had all these other implications for culture, religion, politics, sexuality, religion and discovery.”

“The Ephemeral History” was based on Dr. Dugan’s graduate school dissertation on the role of smell in England’s playhouses and texts, but the idea to investigate smell first was born after a reading of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” where she noticed “tons of really gross jokes about smell.”

“I started reading old medical texts to learn about what smell meant during that time, and then began to look into smell of playhouses and metaphorical references to smells in London’s sewer systems and neighborhoods.”

Dr. Dugan found herself intrigued by differences in the uses and descriptions of smell. “I found the question of what life was like in the past really fascinating, and I think my research delves from that curiosity,” she said.

Her research continued in England and France, where she read about smell in London’s Museums of Health and Medicine and visited a perfume museum in Versailles. She immersed herself in what she calls “literature for the senses,” which at times revealed personal glimpses into the lives of early modern Englishmen and women.

“Literature for the senses—particularly olfaction—is a tremendous historical archive because you don’t just get description of scent but the phenomenon of experiencing it,” said Dr. Dugan. “Partly what I love about the early modern England time period is that the literature gets at personal experience that is also related to broader, shared stories about the culture.”

Dr. Dugan also found “weird, enormous amounts” of recipes in old cookbooks about how to perfume leather gloves, which “clued me in to how prevalent and important fragrance was in early modern life.”

In France’s perfume archives, Dr. Dugan was able to smell essential oils that were commonplace in early modern England perfumes. Ambergris, a substance produced in the digestive system of sperm whales, now usually only exists in modern day fragrances as a synthetic version.

“Actual ambergris oil and the synthetic version smell totally different,” said Dr. Dugan. “I got to sniff the essence of musk, civet and all heavy animal smells that don’t on their own smell good, but combined with other layers make great perfumes. That added another dimension to the book—what smells we can encounter from the past and what can be lost forever.”

The tender, familial role of sassafras was another surprising discovery for Dr. Dugan.

“I would read these moving descriptions about how people would make cradles out of sassafras wood because they believed that the scent would protect their babies from the devil,” she said. “It was a powerful smell.”

“The smells I thought would be the keys to perfume were not always the smells that in the past were the most poignant for their culture and for that cultural moment,” she added.

Other prevalent scents included jasmine in pleasure gardens and rosewater in the court of Henry VIII. Dr. Dugan discovered the king gave away more than 27 different bottles of distilled rosewater to his mistresses, which she said were made out of imported damask roses. These gifts gave Dr. Dugan a bit of insight into the king’s emotional life.

“When we gift perfume, it’s often a reflection of a beloved’s sense of his or her lover, but I think what Henry VIII was doing was saying, ‘Here’s a bit of me; I wear this and you can now wear this and through smell you are marked as mine,’” she said. “So in the book, I explore what olfactory references are associated with the court and what they mean. The Tudor rose is a powerful icon that signals royal lineage and I think the rosewater allowed King Henry VIII to apply that idea in a three-dimensional way.”

Dr. Dugan also came across unusual words that described smells at the time. Her favorite is “smeek,” which refers to something that both smokes and smells.

“There was a whole language to describe smells,” she said.

Dr. Dugan, who came to GW in fall 2005, called her position in the Department of English a “dream job.”

“The number of well-known faculty who have become my colleagues is sort of mind-blowing, and I found over the first year that I really loved teaching in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “I share the same passions that many of my students have about why they came to GW—it’s just an amazing place to learn.”

Dr. Dugan currently teaches an introductory course in Shakespeare and a graduate course on the space of the stage in early modern England. For both courses, Dr. Dugan utilizes the District’s cultural offerings—the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Folger Shakespeare Company and the Kennedy Center, among them—as well as multimedia in her classroom.

“There are all these great things that I’m showing in class and I’m learning alongside students,” she said. “We’re working together to figure out what these plays mean now. It’s been really fun.”

A recipient of a 2011 Bender Teaching Award, Dr. Dugan said the recognition is more reflective of the strength of George Washington’s Department of English as a whole.

“Most of what I do in the classroom I learned from my colleagues, so that award shows how lucky I am to be surrounded by really great teachers and really great students,” she said.

Dr. Dugan did not plan to pursue teaching as a profession until she went to college and discovered “a world of ideas” she never wanted to leave.

“I always say the classroom is a total utopian space,” said Dr. Dugan. “Utopia isn’t really achievable but the reach is there in that space, and in college I first discovered that.”

Although her book is on store shelves, Dr. Dugan is still pondering the significance of smell. She remembers a few years ago, on a crowded sidewalk in New York City, passing a woman whose coat smelled like mothballs. Dr. Dugan turned around and followed the woman for a few blocks, her mind filling with memories of her grandmother.

It’s these kinds of unexpected moments, she said, that reveal how powerful smell can be.

“I wasn’t consciously thinking that ‘mothballs equal grandma’ but in that moment I was instantly 10 years old, rooting through her closet for something,” said Dr. Dugan. “That’s what I think is so interesting about smell—I think the brain works in myriad ways to foster those connections, the meanings of smell in our lives.”

“My book tries to tell that story in a scholarly way, but it ends with thinking about that relationship of what the body is hard wired to do and how the meanings that we accrue over time show the spaces we’ve been and the places we’ve touched,” she added. “Strange things can happen just beneath perception.”

GW Today Interviews Professor Alex Huang

2011-12-04T15:57:00.006-05:00

The Global Influence of Shakespeare

Associate Professor of English Alex Huang co-founded a video archive of worldwide performances inspired by the Bard’s works.

Nov. 28, 2011

With just a click of your mouse, you can travel to Brazil to view “Othello,” watch “Hamlet” in Egypt, attend “King Lear” in England, or see India’s take on “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

This virtual field trip is courtesy of Global Shakespeares, a free, open-access video and performance archive of 300 and counting Shakespeare and Shakespeare-influenced productions and clips from around the world.

“It’s sort of a YouTube for Shakespearians and theater and film enthusiasts, but with much better stability and scholarly foundation,” said GW Associate Professor of English Alex Huang, co-founder of the archive.

A Shakespeare scholar, Dr. Huang created the archive along with Peter Donaldson, Ford Foundation Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fully launched it online in 2010. He came to George Washington in 2011 from Pennsylvania State University, where he taught for seven years.

The performances highlighted on Global Shakespeares can bring a breadth and depth to understanding the Bard and his work, said Dr. Huang.

“Great ideas transcend historical and cultural boundaries and can be articulated in many different forms and languages,” he said. “Shakespeare lends himself to translation—many directors believe that Shakespeare in translation is more effective, more sexy and spicy than in his original text.”

Dr. Huang added the cross-cultural interpretations can challenge assumptions about Shakespeare’s most famous plays. “Encountering these plays through refreshing performances in new contexts can reinvigorate our dulled senses,” he said. “Shakespeare in translation doesn’t take away from the Bard. Instead, it makes his work more relevant to a worldwide audience.”

The video archive first began 10 years ago as a collection of tapes from field research trips in Dr. Huang’s office at Stanford University, where he earned a doctorate in comparative literature and a joint doctorate in humanities. As his collection grew, colleagues began requesting the videos to expose their students to Shakespeare performances from around the world.

Mailing the tapes back and forth quickly became unmanageable and new technologies for the production and distribution of digital video were rapidly becoming more accessible to educators, so Dr. Huang decided to bring the collection online.

“I thought, ‘Why don’t we take advantage of what is available technologically today, and really transform digital video to make it an integral part of the study of Shakespeare performance and a project to promote cross-cultural understanding?’” he said.

Global Shakespeares has been recognized as a valuable research source for scholars. It has been reviewed in major journals and newspapers, including Shakespeare Quarterly, the British Shakespeare Association’s Shakespeare and Asian Theatre Journal. The archive has also been indexed by the Modern Language Association’s bibliography, World Shakespeare Bibliography and other scholarly databases.

Each video on Global Shakespeares is posted with permission, is thoroughly researched and properly annotated, and contains subtitles when needed, said Dr. Huang.

Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Boston University; MIT; and universities in the United Kingdom, China, Switzerland, Korea and Brazil are using the project in their courses.

Analytics show Global Shakespeares has visitors from more than 88 countries—and these visitors used more than 55 languages to access the site, which features a dynamic map on which users can plot the trajectory of a touring production, interactive historical timeline, tabbed browsing and a variety of search options.

“You can find Shakespeare in places you might not even think of,” said Dr. Huang. Almost every continent is represented on the site, including Asia, South America and Europe.

One of the most interesting aspects of Global Shakespeares is that users can view the same play performed in different countries to see firsthand how different cultures interpret and perform pivotal scenes.

One example is a scene from Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, “Titus Andronicus,” where Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, is raped and her hands and tongue are cut off. How should actors perform this scene on stage?

“If you do it literally, you run the risk of diminishing Shakespeare’s tragedy into parody. Too much violence can become comical and it’s unreal,” said Dr. Huang. “Too little and you fail to convey the weight of the tragedy.”

One director from Japan had a solution. Director Yukio Ninagawa used red silk streamers to portray blood flowing from Lavinia after the attack.

“It’s beautiful and eerie at the same time,” said Dr. Huang. “This is one example of how different interpretations can transform our understanding of the play.”

There are also performances on Global Shakespeares that challenge widely accepted interpretations of Shakespeare’s better-known plays. For “The Merchant of Venice,” Dr. Huang said plays from Japan and China focus more on the question of justice in a capitalist society and Portia—the beautiful heiress disguised as a male lawyer—than on Shylock and anti-Semitism, a theme that post-Holocaust and particularly post-9/11 Western versions usually emphasize. The play is often retitled “The Woman Lawyer,” “A Bond of Flesh” or “A Pound of Flesh” in Asia.

And Dr. Huang noted “Othello” is a study of jealousy in many countries—and not of race. “Shakespeare as a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe in London,” said Dr. Huang.

“That’s the blind spot that our traditions can cast on us,” said Dr. Huang. “When you look at Shakespeare in a global context you realize Shakespeare is much more capacious and profound and plays a very important role in the cultural life today.”

Global Shakespeares is not only a cultural resource but also a teaching one. Using VITAL—Video Interaction for Teaching and Learning, a video-centric course management system connected to Global Shakespeares— Dr. Huang’s students use performances on Global Shakespeares to create their own video clips and illustrate their own interpretations. Dr. Huang teaches two Shakespeare courses in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences this semester.

“With VITAL, students play the role of a curator with films and video clips by critiquing them, circulating their film essays and commenting on one another’s video collections and essays,” said Dr. Huang.

“Once they make their first video clip, they’re hooked,” he said, adding that VITAL allows students to “slow down” by defamiliarizing the plays. “When students experience a speech such as Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ in radically new performance styles or in a foreign language, they can approach it without prejudice or learned reverence,” he said.

Dr. Huang, a member of GW’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs, holds a position as a research affiliate in literature at MIT. He is widely published in the field of Shakespeare and early modern studies and has appeared on a number of media outlets, including the BBC, to talk about the fields of digital humanities and global Shakespeare. In spring 2012, he will be a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Although many Shakespeare scholars prefer more traditional productions, Dr. Huang said the more creative, out-of-the-box interpretations of Shakespeare plays are actually the ones that end up revealing the most about the Bard.

“The reason Shakespeare is still alive today is because he’s able to thrive in so many different environments,” he said. “No other playwright from any other culture has this ability.”

Students Took to the Stage in a Debate about The Tempest

2011-11-15T19:21:00.006-05:00

[By Tori Kerr, GW English major]

With the Republican debates taking up most of media’s attention in the month of November, it seems fitting that GW should have its own debate—only, this one wasn’t political. Students from both Prof. Holly Dugan’s and Prof. Alexander Huang’s Shakespeare classes took to the stage in a debate concerning the protagonist of The Tempest—the topic was: “Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.” Does he truly forgive his enemies or is it all an act? Four students from each class formed arguments complete with opening statements, rebuttals, and closing remarks.

I entered the event with my own opinion, which was that Prospero was certainly no model for forgiveness. I must admit, however, that the negative team had an advantage in the wording of the prompt: can a debator argue that any person, not only Prospero, is a model of “true” forgiveness? As the negative team pointed out, that would be like arguing that Prospero is Christlike; even on the cross, Jesus pardoned his enemies. It was this tricky word “true” that the negative team utilized in order to formulate their argument.

I knew the debate would get heated among the participants, but I didn’t expect to feel so excited just as an audience member. The argument quickly transformed from animated to passionate and then to fiery. Members of the opposing teams talked over each other, threw out sassy rebuttals and even waved fingers in the air to punctuate their speeches. While this sort of frenzy might not be acceptable for the GW Mock Trial team, state courtrooms, or the Republican preside ntial candidates, it made for a surprisingly exciting debate on The Tempest. I didn’t expect to enjoy the debate as much as I did. The debators’ energy clearly showed that Shakespeare’s plays were not written for only 16th century audiences—his themes are timeless. Revenge and forgiveness are topics for debate that will endure as long as humans (and politcal campaigns) do.

Graduate Teaching Assistant Molly Lewis for Prof. Huang's class was also impressed by both teams' performance. She wrote:

"The impassioned debaters were allowed an opening and an additional statement (both followed by cross examinations by the opposing team), as well as a rebuttal at the end of the debate. These vibrant “back and forth”s elicited strong reactions from their audience members, who eventually had to vote for which debate team they agreed with. In the end, though, many actually abstained from voting, a true testament to how well both debate teams performed."

Video Highlight

How to Make a Human, December 1 & 2

2011-11-13T21:52:00.024-05:00

Please join us on Thursday December 1 and Friday December 2 for two events centered around critical animal studies.

On Thursday December 1 we will hold a symposium on Karl Steel's important new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011). The book is available for $40 in hardcover via Amazon, and $10 for an e-version on CD. If you plan to attend, please try to read the book ahead of time. The symposium features Julian Yates, Peggy McCracken and Tobias Menely, as well as Karl Steel. The event will take place from 4-6 PM (note change of time) in GW's Academic Center, 801 22nd St NW, Rome Hall 771. The symposium is free and open to all who wish to attend. It will be followed by an informal vegetarian dinner. The cost is $15 exclusive of beverages. If you would like to join us for dinner, you must register by Tuesday November 29.

Friday December 2 at noon is the date of our last seminar of the year, on Critical Animal Theory, with all the guests from the previous night's symposium speaking about the field. You do not need to attend the Thursday symposium to participate in the Friday seminar. Some short readings will be distributed ahead of time. Lunch will be served. If you would like to attend, you must reserve a spot and secure the readings by emailing Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) no later than Tuesday November 29. If you RSVP please come: we pay for every lunch reserved, and it is a shame when people hold a spot but do not attend the seminar.

Meet our presenters:

Karl Steel is Assistant Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he specializes in medieval literature, intellectual history and social practice, and critical animal theory. How to Make a Human joins his impressive list of publications on animals, including an article written for the new collection Shakesqueer (2011) and a thematic issue of the journal postmedieval (co-edited with Peggy McCracken) called "The Animal Turn" (2011).

Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of expertise include medieval French and Occitan literature, gender and sexuality, and women's studies. Her most recent book is The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (2003). She is currently writing two books: one on Marie de France and the other on animality and embodiment.

Tobias Menely is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University, focusing on such diverse topics as eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, animal studies, climate and weather, time, and ethics and community. He recently published an article for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies: "Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest" (2010). Right now he is finishing his book, The Community of Creatures: Sensibility and the Voice of the Animal.

Julian Yates is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His areas of expertise are medieval and Renaissance British literature, literary theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism. His latest book is Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), and he has published extensively on all things post/human: for instance, "Counting Sheep: Dolly does Utopia (again) (2004) and "It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human" (2010).

Korean Tempest a Success

2011-11-11T00:09:00.006-05:00

[By Alex Huang]

Co-sponsored by the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, the Korean Embassy, and other units at GW, and co-organized by new GW English professor Alex Huang and colleagues in History, EALL, and Anthropology the Korean Tempest event was a huge success this weekend, with over 100 people from the community and GW in the audience. The renowned Korean director and playwright of over 60 original plays Mr. OH Tae-suk visited GW and spoke at the colloquium on Saturday, November 5, to shed light on his methods of artistic creation and his vision for The Tempest. The filmed version of the performance in Edinburgh was screened in the Elliott School of International Affairs on Friday, November 4. Oh's Tempest won the prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival this year (August 2011).

Oh's Tempest (Mokwha Repertory Company) opened with a bang with a storm scene that transported Shakespeare's The Tempest to 5th century Korea. Prospero's book of magic transformed into a multi-colored magical fan which he handed over to the audience at the end of the play. Caliban became a two-headed monster (played by two talented actors in one robe) who is sawn apart. Oh adopts a remarkably light, fun approach to a play that has routinely been politicized in postcolonial discourses and to the volatile political situation in the two Koreas today.

Video highlights are now available online with English subtitles:

The amazing storm scene with drum beats

Ferdinand "reborn" as a pillow

Two-headed Caliban separated by Prospero into two creatures

The editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and Folger Shakespeare Library research division director Dr. David Schalwkyk gave brilliant opening remarks, and GW English professor Alex Huang introduced the film on Friday and gave a talk on global Shakespeare on Saturday.

Students who attended the event were impressed by the deep baritone drums and turbulent music. They wrote: "The stage bursts forth with color and white robed dancers elegantly gesticulating with beautiful white pieces of cloth." The audience, they said, was treated to "a jarring visual portrait of the stormy opening scene." They were fond of the Caliban as two-headed monster (or Siamese twin) "consisting of a normal-sized man and his 'little brother,' a figure of diminutive stature. By giving Caliban two heads, Oh Tae-suk gives added depth to the character that can now converse with itself and have two separate personalities. In Shakespeare’s original play Caliban maintains several child-like features and has been molded by Prospero’s teachings as a child. Oh maintains the child-like aspects of Caliban within the smaller Siamese twin, often referred to as “Little Brother.”

Film Screening and Roundtable: Anonymous

2011-11-10T14:00:00.002-05:00

[By Alex Huang]

Graduate students in English and students in Prof Alex Huang's and Prof Holly Dugan's Shakespeare classes were treated to a pre-release screening of Roland Emmerich's controversial new film "Anonymous" on Tuesday, October 25 by Sony Pictures at the Regal Theatre Gallery Place in downtown DC. "Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England," the film--with Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi in the prologue--proposes that the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Along the way, the film dramatizes "cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage."

Following the event, a roundtable was organized by Prof Huang on November 3 to combat the propaganda machine set in action by the film. In attendance were graduate and undergraduate students in English, Professor Jonathan Hsy, Alex Huang, and Holly Dugan. Among the topics discussed were the social expectations and resistance of "geniuses," Hollywood's penchant for "conspiracy" and scandals, and--most importantly--how to set historical facts straight.

"Anonymous" calls to mind such films as Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. But there is one thing even undergraduates and non-specialist audiences do not buy. The film presented a very unconvincing picture of literary production. In the whole of early modern England, no one other than the Earl could write good poetry, and "Shakespeare," Jonson, and Marlowe stumbled over one another to beg (or threaten as the case may be) de Vere for an uninterrupted supply of manuscripts (which acts peculiarly as drugs). The film also misled the audience to assume that no other companies or performance venues mattered in Shakespeare's time.

The good thing that can come from "Anonymous" is that it can lead people to the real tour-de-force that is James Shapiro's fine book Contested Will (http://www.amazon.com/Contested-Will-Who-Wrote-Shakespeare/dp/1416541624), Records of Early English Drama (http://www.reed.utoronto.ca/), Early Modern London Theatres online (http://www.emlot.kcl.ac.uk/), and other vetted sources for further study.

Debating The Tempest 11/10

2011-11-09T13:24:00.002-05:00

Debate on The Tempest: 6 pm, 11/10 (Thursday) in Funger 210

Topic: Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.

Debate teams from Prof. Alex Huang's and Prof. Holly Dugan's Shakespeare classes.

Questions: contact acyhuang@gwu.edu

Merchant of Venice Conversation 11/14

2011-11-09T13:21:00.002-05:00

From Jenna Weissman Joselit, GW Judaic Studies:

In conjunction with The Merchant of Venice production and class that I'm team-teaching with Leslie Jacobson in TRDA, the law school will be holding a conversation next Monday, November 14th, at 3 p.m. in the Burns Faculty Conference Center (B505) of the law school, between Dean Paul Schiff Berman and Barry Edelstein of New York's Public Theater on the legal implications of the play. The conversation will be moderated by The New Republic's legal affairs editor and GW law professor, Jeffrey Rosen. It promises to be quite a lively occasion.

Korean Tempest @ GW 11/4

2011-11-01T18:53:00.002-04:00

FILM SCREENING: The Tempest

Adapted and Directed by Oh Tae Suk

Film of an Award-winning Korean Performance with English Subtitles

4-6 pm, Friday Nov. 4, 2011

Harry Harding Auditorium, Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E St, NW

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

GW MEMS Contribute to SIY

2011-10-27T22:12:00.007-04:00

The Shakespearean International Yearbook

Volume 11: Special issue, Placing Michael Neill. Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

Imprint: Ashgate
Illustrations: includes 7 b&w illustrations
Published: November 2011
Edited by Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, Alexander C. Y. Huang, and Jonathan Gil Harris

Updated MEMSI Events ... and More

2011-10-18T10:41:00.001-04:00

We look forward to welcoming you to the panel "What Monsters Mean" with Asa Simon Mittman and Jeffrey Weinstock on Thursday October 27 at 4 PM (1957 E Street NW, Room 213). All are welcome to this panel presentation and open discussion; no RSVP is required. More information here:
http://www.gwmemsi.com/2011/10/what-monsters-mean-1027-1028.html

On Friday October 28 at 12:15 PM (please note slight change of time), we will hold a seminar for students and faculty on "Monster Theory." Lunch will be served. If you plan to come, you must RSVP to Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) by Tuesday October 25 to receive the readings and reserve a space. Please read the pre-distributed essays before you come, and if you do RSVP, please attend.

On Thursday December 1 we will hold a symposium on Karl Steel's important new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011). The book is available for $40 in hardcover via Amazon, and $10 for an e-version on CD. If you plan to attend, please try to read the book ahead of time. The symposium features Julian Yates, Peggy McCracken and Tobias Menely, as well as Karl Steel. The event will take place from 4-6 PM (note change of time) in GW's Academic Center, Rome Hall 771.

Friday December 2 at noon is the date of our last seminar of the year, on Critical Animal Theory, with all the guests from the previous night's symposium speaking about the field. You do not need to attend the Thursday symposium to participate in the Friday seminar. Some very short works will be distributed ahead of time. An email requesting an RSVP will be distributed next month, and lunch will be served.

AND, mark your calendar for these spring events:

Friday January 27 12 PM

Lunch seminar with Ben Tilghman (GW, Art History), "The Enigmatic Nature of Things" (precirculated essay)

Friday February 24 5:30 PM (note change of time)
Symposium on "Ecological Movement" with Stacy Alaimo, Eileen Joy, Jennifer James and Lowell Duckert. Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St NW)

Friday April 13 9 AM
Breakfast seminar with Danna Agmon (University of Michigan), “Striking Pondichéry: Religion and Labor Disputes in an Eighteenth Century French Colonial City.” Introduced by Leah Chang (GW, French).

The spring semester will also feature a symposium on translation organized by Alex Huang and Jonathan Hsy. Stay tuned for details.

What Monsters Mean: 10/27 & 10/28

2011-10-04T21:48:00.008-04:00

Plan to attend two monstrous MEMSI events right before Halloween. Two authorities will visit us to discuss what monsters mean:

Jeffrey Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. His areas of expertise are popular culture, American literature, and literary criticism. Publications include Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women as a Form of Social Protest (Fordham University Press, 2008), in which he examines the differences in ghost stories told by male and female writers. Other interests are vampires, "gothic" music and culture, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Asa Simon Mittman is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. He has written and co-written several books and articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages, including Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge, 2006). He is also the president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application) and co-director of the Digital Mappaemundi, an extraordinary resource that changes the ways we study medieval maps and geographic texts. He is currently working on articles on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript, the Franks Casket, and images of Jews on medieval world maps.

Join us for both events if you can:

Thursday October 27 at 4 PM, 1957 E St. NW Room 213

Professors Weinstock and Mittman will lead "What Monsters Mean," an informal discussion of the cultural significance of monsters from the medieval period to the present day. The event is open to all who wish to attend.

Friday October 28 at 12 PM, Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW)

GW MEMSI and the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) are co-sponsoring a seminar on monster theory. Both professors will discuss selections from the work as well as the contours of the larger field. This lunchtime seminar is open to all interested faculty and graduate students, but you must pre-register with Lowell Duckert to receive the readings [lduckert@gwu.edu]:

1. Selections from Jeffrey Weinstock, Vampires: Undead Cinema. Wallflower Press's "Short Cuts" series. Forthcoming 2011.

2. Asa Simon Mittman and Susan Kim, "Anglo-Saxon Frames of Reference: Spatial Relations on the Page and in the World," Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, vol. 2 (2009), with Susan Kim.

3. Asa Simon Mittman, "Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies," Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman, with Peter Dendle (London: Ashgate, January 2012).

See you later this month!

Fall Semester Events

2011-09-28T07:25:00.010-04:00

GW MEMSI is co-sponsoring some fall semester events that might appeal to you.

To prepare for Halloween, two monstrous events to attend. "What Monsters Mean," an informal discussion of the cultural significance of monsters from the medieval period to the present day by two experts in the field, will take place on Thursday October 27 at 4 PM at 1957 E St. NW Room 213. The event is open to all who wish to attend and features:

On Friday October 28 at noon in Rome 771, GW MEMSI and the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) are co-sponsoring a seminar on monster theory. Jeffrey Weinstock and Asa Simon Mittman will discuss selections from their work as well as the contours of the larger field. This lunchtime seminar is open to all interested faculty and graduate students, but you must pre-register with Lowell Duckert to receive the readings (lduckert@gwu.edu).
November 4-5: As part of Staging Korea: Korean Theatre in Search of New Aesthetics, a day-long event celebrating the beauty of Korean performance traditions, scholars and directors will discuss the internationalization of Korean theatre.

This year's highlight is the visit of Master Oh Tae Suk from Seoul and the screening of the film of his production, The Tempest, which won the Herald Angel’s Award at the 2011 Edinburgh International Arts Festival. The screening is on November 4 at 4 p.m.; the audience will have an opportunity to interact with the director at a presentation on November 5. Both events at the Harry Harding Auditorium, 1957 E Street. The events are part of this year's Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities. This event is co-sponsored by MEMSI and co-organized by Professor Alex Huang.

Thursday December 1 4-6 PM in Rome 771: a symposium on Karl Steel's new book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Responses from:

The symposium will be followed on Friday December 2 by a lunchtime seminar in Rome 771 on critical animal theory, co-sponsored with the GW English Department's 19th Century Studies cluster. Details of both these events will be circulated soon.

Finally, please mark your calendar for Friday February 24, when MEMSI and the Graduate Program in English will sponsor a symposium on Ecologies featuring Stacy Alaimo.

Jessica Frazier Breakfast Seminar 10/7

2011-09-22T11:13:00.007-04:00

Come join us for our first breakfast seminar of the year on Friday, October 7th. Jessica Frazier, doctoral candidate at GW, will discuss her paper called "Re-Orienting the Diamond: India, the Transnational Jewel Trade, and the Early Modern Theater.” A light breakfast will be served. We meet at 9AM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St NW).

Her paper is pre-circulated ahead of time to allow for a fruitful conversation. Please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] and I will send you a copy.

Jessica recently participated in an NEH seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library this summer: "Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global." We posted her recollections earlier this month.

See you on the 7th!

Jessica Frazier on "Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global"

2011-09-13T14:12:00.001-04:00

by Jeffrey Cohen

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is proud of our graduate student affiliates. They give us many good reasons to brag! Recently we highlighted Nedda Mehdizadeh's inclusion in an NEH seminar on Re-Mapping the Renaissance. Very few graduate students are admitted to each NEH seminar, and so we take it as a sign of Nedda's great promise that she was invited to enroll.

But she is not the only GW graduate student to have been offered a place in a seminar. This summer Jessica Frazier was accepted to participate in “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was my pleasure to compose a letter of endorsement for Jessica in which I wrote:

Jessica has been auditing my course on “Objects, Agency, and the Constitution of Life.” I treasure her presence in the seminar: she brings to the readings, both in theory and in primary texts, an eye attentive to the complexities of narrative and material detail. Her queries to her fellow students in the class advance our discussion exponentially. She can always be counted upon to make cogent connections among disparate works and to keep bringing the conversation around to how goods (especially clothing and jewelry) circulate within international networks of trade and prestige. This class has been my favorite seminar in 16 years of teaching, thanks in no small part to Jessica’s contributions ... Jessica’s dissertation excavates the global narratives behind clothing and luxury items, especially as these objects materialize contemporary interchanges between west and east. Jessica is especially interested in Oriental costumes worn on stage and in public: how the sartorial speaks identity; how the hybridity of English body in Eastern dress functions socially (what it disrupts, what it enables); how costume adornments like diamonds speak stories that cross national boundaries and intermix the foreign with the domestic; how novelty of dress and of self performance might function in a world where the ambivalences of colonialism already had a long history; how aesthetics might be a cross-cultural phenomenon. Notably, Jessica is interested at looking at contact zones from both sides: not just how the orient arrives in England, but what travels from the west into the east. Her research is nuanced, interdisciplinary, and innovative. One day it will be published as an outstanding book.

Now wonder then, Jessica writes the following report of her summer at the Folger. Congratulations, Jessica, on your achievement!

----------

As the spring semester came to a close, I received word that I would have the opportunity to participate in an NEH Institute entitled “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global.” A few months earlier, I had begun to outline the direction of my dissertation project: an exploration of fashionable early modern objects and their movement through transnational networks. Thus, I had been drawn to the questions that were to guide “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global.” How did the Shakespeare of the London Globe Theater become a global enterprise? And how did the global inform the productions of the Renaissance English Globe? As the Institute organizers wrote so eloquently in their “Dear Colleague” letter, “How did Shakespeare emerge from an early modern London that was increasingly aware of an expanding world to become a singular voice and an icon of empire and Englishness, the most significant representative of a globalized literary culture, and the most popular playwright of the non-Anglophone world?” This was a conversation in which I very much desired to take part, and a conversation that I sensed would open up novel avenues for the project on which I was embarking. As I discovered, I was not to be disappointed.

Hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library and directed by Professor Michael Neill (Professor Emeritus at the University of Auckland), the Institute followed a rigorous five-week course of study, beginning with an inquiry into the perception of the global in Shakespeare’s England and ending with an examination of Shakespeare as both a tool of British colonialism and as a mechanism to speak back to an imperial system. Each week brought leading scholars in the fields of English, history, and film and media studies to serve as guest facilitators. The early weeks of the Institute dealt directly with my area of study, and I acquired new perspectives on mercantile encounter in the period. As the weeks progressed, “Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global” led me into less familiar, but equally valued, terrain, as I learned of contemporary, international cinematic productions of Shakespearean plays. During this latter portion of our study, Professor Neill challenged us to consider what makes these adaptations “Shakespearean”? This question now informs a film assignment on my syllabus this semester for “Introduction to English Literature.”

As one of three graduate students in the group, I was perhaps not entirely prepared for the kindness and spirit of camaraderie with which I was met by the other participants, many of whom are experienced professors. From them, I garnered encouragement and advice about both the dissertating process and academic life post-graduate school. But perhaps most importantly, they provided me with much insight about being a teacher. Teaching strategies, discussion techniques, and graded assignments that I am currently incorporating into my classroom bear their mark and influence. I know that the professor that I am becoming is and will hopefully continue to be inflected by my fellow participants’ gracious commitment not only to scholarship but also to their students. Professor Neill, the staff of the Folger, the Institute participants, the guest scholars—all of these components contributed to a summer that has helped to shape the path of my scholarship and the course of my profession. I am so grateful for it.

~ Jessica Roberts Frazier

Digital Inquirers: GW MEMSI Welcomes GW Professor Alexander Huang and Folger Director Michael Witmore

2011-08-30T17:33:00.021-04:00

We're overjoyed that two new scholars have entered the GW MEMSI community this fall semester:

1) Alexander Huang, GW Associate Professor of English, specializes in Shakespeare and globalization (especially Asia), Shakespeare and performance, and digital humanities. He is also Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT and General Editor of the Shakespearean International Yearbook (since 2010). As co-founder and co-editor of Global Shakespeares, an open-access digital video archive based at MIT, he recently served as the video curator of an exhibition on early modern and postmodern Sino-European cultural exchange at the Folger Shakespeare Library. His research is more than just plugged-in: if you have not visited Global Shakespeares or his personal website yet, do so immediately. Professor Huang has been busy and abroad this summer; he gave a talk at the Edinburgh International Festival, "All the world's a stage," that touched on touring theatre, festivals in 21st century cultural life, Shakespeare's global career, King Lear, and The Tempest. He then conducted interviews for the televised BBC 2 Review Show and for "Classics Unwrapped" on BBC Radio Scotland. During these programs, he discussed global Shakespeare, the Edinburgh International Festival, and what's at stake in performing Shakespeare today. What's more, the GW Hatchet just published an interview with him, "Bringing Shakespeare to Life." Please welcome him personally at a GW MEMSI event this academic year.

Recent Publications

Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia UP, 2009), winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, an honorable mention of NYU’s Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre, and the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) Colleagues’ Choice Award

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, co-edited by Alexander Huang and Charles Ross (Purdue UP, 2009)

2) Michael Witmore, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and newly-appointed Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. His research interests include Shakespeare, early modern intellectual history, and the history of materialism. He directs the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a group of humanists who use computers to assist in traditional humanities research such as mapping the prose genres of Early English Books Online (EEBO). Take the time to navigate his blog, Wine Dark Sea. His most recent publication, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (Norton, 2010), was inspired by a painting in the library he now directs. You can read more about this work and his exciting new tenure in a Folger interview. We hope to have Professor Witmore headline an event for us in the near future.

Please welcome these two renowned scholars and "digital inquirers" to the GW MEMSI community!

Suzanne Miller Lunch Seminar 9/9/11

2011-08-30T16:47:00.003-04:00

The first GW MEMSI Seminar of the 2011-12 year will feature the work of Suzanne Miller, an assistant professor in the History Department at GW. Her essay "Cycles of Violence and Penance: Crafting the Narrative of Venice's Adriatic Empire" is available for circulation immediately. Please email Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) to obtain a copy of the paper and to RSVP for the seminar.

We meet in Rome Hall 771 (Academic Center, 801 22nd St NW, Foggy Bottom Metro) on Friday 9/9 promptly at noon. A light lunch will be served. The seminar is a conversation about precirculated work in progress, so please arrive having read the essay and ready to give feedback and join the conversation.

In order to ensure that there is enough food, you must RSVP to Lowell to attend; if you do RSVP, please do come.

Professor Miller's interests include the intersection of politics and cultural production, the construction of authority, and cross-cultural encounter. Her current research focuses on colonial endeavor and foreign rule within the medieval Mediterranean. Read more here.

We look forward to seeing you on the 9th!

For the record ...

2011-08-25T13:55:00.003-04:00

... we would settle for the .5 in that 113.5.

We're cheap, and easily made happy.

Oliphaunt Books

2011-07-21T07:37:00.001-04:00

Oliphaunt Books, sponsored by GW MEMSI, is an impress of punctum press. The website is up, as is the Facebook page.

More soon!

Nedda Mehdizadeh on Re-mapping the Renaissance

2011-07-12T18:30:00.003-04:00

Two years ago the National Endowment for the Humanities altered the rules slightly for their prestigious summer seminars, enabling two advanced graduate students to attend each program along with the faculty members who form their main audience.

GW MEMSI is very proud of our two PhD students in English who have earned difficult to obtain spots in these seminars, Nedda Mehdizadeh and Jessica Frazier. I've asked them to each report on the seminars they have taken. Nedda's account follows below. But first let me state here how proud I am of her achievement: I've known Nedda since she enrolled at GW as a masters student, and have admired her rapid intellectual growth. In the letter of endorsement I composed for her application I observed:

What I love about Nedda's work is the reciprocal model of influence she employs: she is not interested in simply tracing how the West attempts to exert its power over an exoticized East, but looks attentively to how the East has already exerted a deep and compelling influence over the West. Focusing upon her keyword of translation, Nedda argues that these relations never break into binaries, but are instead complicated, interlaced, and ambivalent. She is a lucid writer and a diligent researcher with competence in the necessary languages. Whether she is examining patristic exegesis or early modern travel literature (and even Milton’s Paradise Lost as travel literature), she has an eye for compelling detail and a commitment to deep historical contextualization. Her work will someday yield an important book.

Congratulations Nedda and we look forward to your future successes!

-- Jeffrey Cohen

--------
Last year, just as the parameters of my dissertation project were becoming clearer, I received an email notification about a summer seminar funded by the NEH and led by University of Maryland-College Park’s Center for Baroque and Renaissance Studies. This program, “Re-mapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Islam and Europe,” described its aim as expanding notions of East/West encounter by re-thinking how those in Europe and those in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa interacted in the early modern period. Building on current trends in scholarship that work to re-imagine a binary opposition in which the West dominates the East, the seminar brought little known sources written and produced by the “East” to the fore. What we found was an East that informed processes of mapmaking, exemplified a mutual exchange of ideas, and inspired artistic trends in the production of fashion and artifacts.

Responsible for the wide-ranging program that was attentive to a variety of disciplines and cultures were the seminar’s two directors – Adele Seeff, director of CRBS and professor of English at UMD as well as Judith Tucker, professor of History at Georgetown University. The three-week schedule included cartography, travel narratives, and trade objects, and inspired a series of fascinating and productive conversations among the seminar’s 17 participants (15 professors/independent scholars and 2 graduate students). The disciplines represented spanned art history, architecture, comparative literature, English literature, history, and religious studies and research interests included matters concerning England, Spain, Portugal, Germany, North Africa, Georgia, Persia Turkey, to name a few. During the three weeks of the program, we discussed assigned readings and attended presentations, and each conversation led us to long lists of references that accompanied the new perspectives we were gaining. We also shared personal research developments we encountered during individual research time, giving us the space and opportunity to process information with our new colleagues and develop our projects in surprising ways. And the environment, no matter what the topic of discussion, was always congenial, warm, and helpful, as well as challenging.

The afterlife of the seminar has also been impressive, and this is a great credit to the wonderful organizers of the program. With the help of phone/email lists as well as our reliable !Ning site, we continue to collaborate and share as a community of scholars.

We have become friends and colleagues who read each other’s work, organize panels for conferences, or add to our growing list of resources with helpful recommendations. It is because of these accomplished scholars and wonderful people that I have been able to approach my project with a new perspective and renewed excitement. This seminar has reshaped the themes of my project, as I am reminded to be more attentive to the generative nature of encounter rather than focusing solely on the dangers so many have hitherto spoken of. It has taught me to consider the other side, inspiring me not only to include eastern-written documents in my upcoming Fall course, “When East Meets West,” but also design the course under the same guidelines of “Re-mapping the Renaissance.” And, perhaps, most importantly, it has provided me with a community of people I will always be grateful to know.

-- Nedda Mehdizadeh

Program

Three-week schedule

Fall 2011 Calendar of Events

2011-06-28T11:20:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: For more information -- including the correct time and location -- about our panel on "What Monsters Mean" follow this link. An accessible and enjoyable look at what monsters reveal about the cultures that dream them, "What Monsters Mean" takes place on Thursday October 27 at 4 PM, 1957 E St. NW Room 213. Everyone is welcome; we would love to have you join us!

The seminar on "Monster Theory" on Friday 10/28 is by pregistration, which has now closed.

More MEMSI events are listed here.

---------------
Please mark your calendars and share this announcement widely. All events are free and welcome all who wish to attend.

Friday September 9 at noon

Lunch seminar

Suzanne Miller (History, GW): "Cycles of Violence and Penance: Crafting the Narrative of Venice's Adriatic Empire"

paper will be circulated two weeks in advance

Rome Hall 771, 801 22nd St NW

Friday October 7, 9 AM

Breakfast seminar

Jessica Frazier (English, GW), “Re-Orienting the Diamond: India, the Transnational Jewel Trade, and the Early Modern Theater”

paper will be circulated two weeks in advance

Rome Hall 771, 801 22nd St NW

Thursday October 27 4 PM

What Monsters Mean (discussion of the cultural significance of monsters from the medieval period to the present day by two experts in the field)

Jeffrey Weinstock, Central Michigan University

Asa Simon Mittman, California State University at Chico

1957 E St. NW Room 213

Friday October 28 12-2 PM

Monster Theory (seminar for interested faculty and graduate students; readings circulated in advance)

Jeffrey Weinstock and Asa Simon Mittman

Rome Hall 771, 801 22nd St

Thursday December 1 4-6 PM

Symposium on Karl Steel's book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages

with:

Rome Hall 771, 801 22nd St

Friday December 2 11 AM

Critical Animal Studies (seminar for interested faculty and graduate students; readings circulated in advance)

With Karl Steel, Julian Yates, Peggy McCracken and Tobias Menely

Rome Hall 771, 801 22nd St

We are working on the spring semester calendar, and want to ensure that you hold this date:

Friday January 27 12 PM

Lunch seminar: Ben Tilghman (GW, Art History), "The Enigmatic Nature of Things"

To be added to our electronic distribution list, please contact Lowell Duckert, lduckert@gwu.edu

Audiofiles for Objects, Networks and Materiality

2011-05-18T07:13:00.000-04:00

The audio files for our Kalazoo session on "Objects, Networks and Materiality" may be found here.

Our thanks to Eileen Joy for recording and posting them!

Kalamazoo Success

2011-05-17T08:41:00.000-04:00

Thank you to everyone who attended or participated in our panel at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo last week. We had about fifty people in the audience, and a lively discussion that followed excellent presentations. Look for news here soon about next year's MEMSI panel.

photo by Jonathan Hsy

We were also honored to be at the punctum press launch. Again, look for an exciting announcement here related to this innovative press.

Objects, Networks, and Materiality (A Roundtable)

Organized and Presided over by Jeffrey Cohen, and Sponsored by GW MEMSI

"A Parliament of Things?" Laurie A. Finke
"Things without Faces" Julie Orlemanski
"Medieval Nets" Valerie Allen
"Passionate Matter" Elizabeth Blake
"Remediating Matter" Kellie Robertson
"The Ice Age Is Never Over" Lowell Duckert

GW MEMSI funded through June 2013

2011-04-28T09:53:00.000-04:00

The George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is happy to announce that it has received funding through the Office of the Vice President of Research through June 2013.

We are pleased and grateful for this extension of our initial three year run into the next twenty four months ... and we look forward to creating that future with you.

Objects and Agency Mini Conference

2011-04-19T10:55:00.000-04:00

Please join the students of Jeffrey Cohen's graduate seminar "Objects, Agency and the Consitution of Life" on Thursday April 28 as we hold a mini-conference to conclude the course. The event takes place at 3 PM in the English Department seminar room, Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St NW).

The panelists are:

Craig Mariconti, "'Hir owene dirke regioun': Inclination and the Life of Stone in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain"

Laura Feigin, "Powerlines in our Bloodlines: On the Temporality of Agency of Vibrant Matter in Marie de France's Guigemar"

Emily Russel, "Otherworldly Corpora: Why Sir Orfeo Looked Away When I Can’t"

Haylie Swenson, "Animal Angels: Nonhuman Intermediaries in Breton Lais"

After the conference we will toast the ending of the spring semester with a drink at a nearby place of libations. Please join us!

AVMEO Afterthoughts

2011-03-22T14:21:00.001-04:00

by Nedda Mehdizadeh

One large black work glove, one unblemished dead rat, and one smooth stick of wood. In this motley assortment of nonhuman “things” gathered near a storm drain in Baltimore, Jane Bennett found the inspiration for her provocative book Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things – a response to different theorizations of matter (Kant, Spinoza, etc) as well as a “reply to a call from things.” For GWMEMSI, it was the springboard for a series of conversations that culminated in the spring conference, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in Early Modern and Medieval Periods.” The exchange Bennett experienced with these nonhuman objects left her with an enticing question: “What if the items really did – in some underdetermined sense – hail me?” As a result, her book attempts to contend with thing-power, with the agency of the object, the thing, the nonhuman entity, and its desires, its stories. The conference, likewise, attempted to contend with the same ideas, calling on a variety of scholars, including Valerie Allen, Eileen Joy, Sharon Kinoshita, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Peggy McCracken, Carla Nappi, Kellie Robertson, Karl Steel, and Julian Yates, not to mention many other scholars from across the continent sharing works-in-progress (or even thoughts-in-progress), to make sense of human and nonhuman interactions. What we came up with were .... well ... more questions à la Jonathan Gil Harris’s concluding remarks, but also perhaps a better idea of which questions to ask and a closer understanding of how we might share the world with our nonhuman cohabitants. What are these nonhuman “things” telling us? What are the ethics behind ventriloquizing their stories? In what ways do these interactions shape our approach to cultural studies?

For me, the nonhuman “things” that began our story, as well as other nonhuman “things” discussed during our two days of conferencing, were guides to unexpected places. As a graduate student working on Anglo-Persian encounter in the early modern period, objects have played but a bit part in my work, getting eclipsed by human interactions between Persian kings and English travelers. The truth is that I began thinking about my dissertation topic through objects. During the spring semester of 2007, my dissertation director, Gil Harris, introduced me to seventeenth-century travel writer Sir Thomas Herbert, and I was taken with his obsession with the ruins of Persepolis. Over the years, I have visited and revisited this moment in his narrative without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion about what to make of the fragments that captivate Herbert – and, me. Or to use Bennett’s words, the objects of Persia’s ancient, fallen past have been calling to me. But their call has been largely ignored, or met with exasperation, like an exhausted mother without an idea of how to pacify her child who incessantly repeats “Mom. Mommy. Mama.”

Recently, however, I started thinking more critically about the structure of Persepolis, and what its fragments are doing. For Herbert, it is a portal to ancient Persia where the palace still stands in all its splendor and is still very much alive. For me, they are a bridge to many temporalities – ancient Persia, early modern Persia, modern day Iran. And I didn’t have to stray too far from home to begin making sense of this moment and its objects, turning, as I often do, to my professors and mentors: Jeffrey Cohen, in his article, “Stories of Stone,” from the inaugural edition of Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and Gil Harris’s chapter on Othello/Desdemona’s handkerchief in his Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. During the AVMEO conference, I found myself transported to Herbert’s encounter over and over again, often by a nonhuman agent introduced by one of our fascinating speakers.

The animals of Sharon Kinoshita’s talk, “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire,” were facilitators of exchange between the Christian and Islamic worlds, often associated with a variety of movements brought upon by gifting or bartering. But as the question/answer period following her talk indicated, these same movements occur with stone; as Kinoshita reminds us, the materials that make up the palace of Persepolis come from different locals, producing one structure made up of fragments from different places. Or the “Flower Girls” of Peggy McCracken’s paper which focuses on “a garden of plentitude” encountered by Alexander in Roman d’Alexandre whose forest can restore virginity. The filles de fleur are in many ways one with the forest and its virgin-(re)making properties after encounters with visitors – such as Alexander and his men – in what is perhaps a metaphor for the plentitude of virgin land that will offer itself to Alexander’s desire for empire-building. Or Valerie Allen’s “handout” – mine, a periwinkle gemstone with clouds of white – that fascinated me with its curves, dent, and coloring, giving me a tangible way to wonder at the “virtue” of an object. Or Carla Nappi’s Chinese words that translated and transliterated Persian script, underscoring the practices of “making sameness” and the importance of considering systems of identification in order to understand the early modern object that is, in many ways, foreign to us now. Each of these moments, brought about because of a nonhuman “thing,” made me think more about what is at stake in thinking about objects, particularly those from the many Persias I encounter in my work.

Something that I am realizing is that I might have been asking the wrong question about Herbert’s Persepolis all along. Maybe there is no stable, singular answer that will ever satisfy me because maybe that is not the point. Herbert, in each edition of his narrative (1634, 1638, 1664, 1677), goes back to Persepolis, reimagines the space, and rewrites it. It is his way of going back to that moment of history. To the moment of Persia’s splendor. To the moment that fascinates him most: Alexander’s destruction of the palace. Maybe it is the “going back” that matters here. Or at least, maybe it is the “going back” that matters to me. Persepolis takes me back. To my roots. To memories of stories told by my family about our past. To my first visit to Iran when I was a nine-year-old walking through the ruins, not fully understanding its importance or the stories the stones were telling, but knowing the profundity of the experience. To the stories it anticipates about Iran today. To the possibilities of what Iran might look like in the future. Eileen Joy, in her inspiring plenary entitled “You Are Here: A Manifesto,” discusses in part three “A Text Is A Sentient Being...” the ways in which texts are themselves vibrant matter. She says, “we might say that literary narratives, although they are, in one sense, completely unreal, or sur-real, and inhuman, pitch themselves at the real world and also create space (underground passageways, shelters, hiding places, root cellars), for that which cannot be brought into being, or cared for, anywhere else.” Returning to Persepolis – to a place that allows me to visit all of the versions of Persia/Iran – brings what is gone, what is left, what is meant to be into that space Joy talks about. Sifting through the ruins of Persepolis is, perhaps, my “reply to a call from things.”

It’s Co-implicated, AVMEO: Drifting with John Muir, Speaking Stones, and a Slower (Non)humanities

2011-03-18T23:41:00.006-04:00

First, I wish to reiterate the comment Jeffrey Cohen made at I n the Middle on the indescribability of last weekend’s conference. Secondly, this post tries not to fill in the blanks of the “AVMEO experience” as much as add another layer to the rich sediment surrounding the event. (Here I point to the brisk conversations happening now: posts by Eileen Joy at ITM; Jonathan Gil Harris and Nedda Mehdizadeh, my conference cohorts, at this blog; and the posts and threads to come, I’m sure.) As audio feeds become available over the next few weeks, those of you who were unable to join us over the nutritious, albeit rigorous and theoretically engaging, weekend will be able to participate in these conversations as well. Please do.

Although I don’t have any pressing Iowan engagements like Jeffrey, my words are nevertheless slow in coming. And despite that this conference, to paraphrase Julia Reinhard Lupton on Saturday night, feels like a “commencement” or an “initiation,” I’m still slow out of the gate.

But slowness, I know, is all right. The conference couldn’t have come at a more accelerated time in my doctoral career. I’m deep in my dissertation topic of “ecomaterialism:” exploring early modern landscapes (or any –scape) as vibrant (Bennett), living, actor-networks (Latour/Serres) of (non)human desires and assemblages (Deleuze). Sometimes I accelerate too fast – as this last sentence make clear. How do we (in the delicate sense of the “we”) compose with the world (in all senses of the word “compose”)? Ecomatter is my mind, and ecocriticism is a vast place to inhabit. And the ontological questions I ask – I need to ask – are beginning to get more “speculative.” Eileen, for example, used Timothy Morton’s work to describe the binary “bind” between human and nonhuman, inside and outside. According to Morton’s “dark ecology” we can’t cancel or preserve this binary, just accept it, and should furthermore delve deeper into it than deep ecology allows. His “melancholic ethics” means “loving the thing as thing,” even if it means staying in the “slime” or “this poisoned ground.”[i] How can/do things relate? Graham Harman was the other absent interlocutor for many of us at the conference. Eileen brought up his object-oriented-ontology in her talk as well – never really touching, objects and their relationships recede from us, relating only to one another in the presence of a third (the vicar) in “vicarious causation.”[ii] Questions abound (rightfully so; see Gil’s post) and complications emerge. The “ethics of interdependence” that Eileen ardently spoke of feels suddenly necessary. Ethics is, in Eileen’s words, “a slowing down,” a welcoming of the other, an addition of beauty. We should listen to the countless inhuman actors in the world, start forming alliances for more sentience (and keep doing it!), and make room for hospitality and its possibilities. (Listen to Peggy McCracken’s captivating talk regarding the host as well.) To paraphrase two (or four?) of Eileen’s alerts, you are here and there are relations. Hello, everything – we’re co-implicated.

So let’s slow down. I want to pick up on Eileen’s idea of the humanist as a “slow recording device,” a being involved in a world of complication (relationships and theories of relationality, of which Morton and Harman are only two, to be sure) who also describes a world of co-implication, of sentience, becomings, and desires shared between actants – whether inanimate or animate. What happens when we slow down, when we take the time to take these ethical steps seriously?

I will try to trace a solid example. (“Track”, actually, might be more useful when talking about steps left behind for us, borrowing from Julian Yates’s woolly speech.) Not surprisingly, I turn to an object – no, not the speeding beach ball hurled at Jeffrey’s head. I’m speaking rather of the stone I retrieved from Valerie Allen’s lapidary grab bag during her talk on “Mineral Virtue.” There is a surprise to this object, after all. Valerie’s lecture, while addressing in its content what Jane Bennett calls “thing-power,” also brought up issues of material agency in its very method. The randomness of the bag – why did I receive an alluring light blue rock that now cohabits my apartment? – underscores what Julian elsewhere has called “agentive drift.” For Julian, drift represents agency itself: when/how one becomes an actor, what these varying actors will become across their endlessly variable networks, into what aleatory directions they might go, “a dispersed or distributed process in which we participate rather than as a property which we are said to own.”[iii] This process importantly produces. Think of Carla Nappi’s consideration of “things as motion” in her discussion of how things undergo “cottonification.” Becoming light-blue stone, perhaps, is the slowest thing imaginable. But drifting with the random stone connected me at that moment, and connects me still, to others with their mutifarious rocks. This form of audience participation or petrification?) shores up one of Julia’s points neatly: how the proximity of assembly and assemblage relates the essential (inter)dependence between persons and things (once again). Was not the conference, at its heart, as event, this very thing?

But wait! Slow down. There’s an additional thing out of the bag (at least for now). I’m speaking about the rock as part of a “domestic ecology” (Julia). Or, should I say, I’m speaking to it? Or, should I say, it’s speaking to me? As I write this, it is “over there” on my desk. For some critics, minding place poses the very problem of contact and how things relate. Yet in my conversation with the stone – I use “conversation” deliberately; stressing the con- (with) and the verse (to turn) – my very writing (right now!) is an alliance, a thing that exists because it is a relation and produces relations (Latour). These continuous connections – stone, keyboard, kiwi, you the reader – shouldn’t primarily lead to the complications of causality, origin, and distance, for they fundamentally take us to the weird joys, strange horizons, and new modes of being that co-implicated assemblages afford. And they should at least drift us away from the bullying terms of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism that (too often) mire ecocriticism. The speaking-writing-stone-subject-object-that-I-am does not dissolve the human/nonhuman border in an act of prosopopoeia, but in fact highlights this border’s ontological nonexistence altogether. In turn, an “ethics of interdependence” involves the “humanist recording device” tracing these tracks of (non)human connections all the while making new ones slowly across time. Ecopoesis would be one example. What else?

Like speaking stones. Like stooping to stone. I think we have a lot to learn from the zany ethics of someone like John Muir, the nineteenth-century Scottish naturalist known for, in addition to his tireless preservationism, his eccentric habits and perambulations in the Yosemite Valley. Muir, in other words, was a consummate drifter; he drifted with the world. Coincidentally, he was ridiculed for the strange habit of “stone sermons,” moments when he dialoged with living rock (his belief) and recorded the lessons learned. Take his methodology, for instance:

“I drifted about from rock to rock, from stream to stream, from grove to grove. Where night found me, there I camped. When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and try to hear what it had to say. When I came to moraines, or ice-scratches upon the rocks, I traced them, learning what I could of the glacier that made them. I asked the boulders I met whence they came and whither they were going. I followed [...]”[iv]

Muir stoops to listen, not to conquer. He beautifully encapsulates what Jane invoked in her keynote lecture about hoarders: “Hearing the call of things.” As such, Muir risks the same pathologization that hoarders incur for their “preternatural vital materialism.” As I’ve been suggesting in this response, an ethics of interdependence is just Muir’s method: an ethics attuned to the voices of things (like rocks) spoken to (“I asked”) and heard from (“to hear what it had to say”). The humanist recording device translates these voices into a body of work, thereby inventing an assemblage of (non)human traces. By drifting “from rock to rock” with a living landscape, by following the boulders’ physical tracks (“whence they came and whither they were going”) Muir’s “traced” (or written) experiences emerge. Nevertheless, although “hearing the call of things” for Muir is a powerful moment of interdependence, Jane reminded us that this “call” is not one devoid of complications. Kellie Roberston, in a sparkling lecture on Chaucer as “man-mineral assemblage” brought to mind “dead” rocks as well. Karl Steel’s and Sharon Kinoshita’s animal lectures put pressure on animal/human boundaries but also exposed the fears that perpetuate them: the precarious “living lupine home” (Karl), the “taxonomic imagination” of Christianity versus Islam (Sharon). In others words, things are complicated. Ultimately, what is crucial to remember is that there are relations, and that hearing the calls of animals, vegetables, and minerals – hello, everything – leads us into places unknown, both dark and beautiful, and into co-implicated conversations, Muir-like, that we “follow” and “follow” and “follow” some more.

[Thank you to the panelists, speakers, and participants who made AVMEO such a success. Special thanks to my vibrant committee co-members: Jeffrey Cohen, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Nedda Mehdizadeh.]

[i] Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

[ii] See, for instance, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A New Theory of Causation” in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 6:1 (2010).

[iii] See “Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift; Or, A Particular Fondness for Oranges circa 1597” in parallax 8:1 (2002).

[iv] John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979) 69.

Animal Vegetable Mineral: Twenty Questions

2011-03-14T07:55:00.001-04:00

by Jonathan Gil Harris

[The following was delivered at the conclusion of the AVMEO conference (3/11/2011, Washington DC) and is offered here as a provocation to further discussion. Please add your answers, observations, and comments to this post!]

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. If this conference’s theme sounds like a pre-modern version of the parlor game “Twenty Questions,” it is perhaps only appropriate that my response should also take the form of twenty questions. The parlor game’s questions seek to arrive through processes of elimination and guesswork at a positive individual entity; but I hope my questions will do the opposite – that is, resist the allure of any singular or final answer to what constitutes the “Nonhuman Lives” of our conference.

So here goes.

What do we mean by the “nonhuman” in medieval and early modern culture?

Are we dealing (as the Animal Vegetable Mineral parlor game does) with taxonomies of the natural world that presume, as did Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae of 1735, the exteriority of the nonhuman to the human?

Is the nonhuman itself subdivided according to this principle of absolute exteriority, which would make of animal, vegetable, and mineral entirely discrete entities?

Or did medieval and early modern writers see the nonhuman as always already in the human – and, by logical extension, the mineral in the vegetable, the vegetable in the animal, and so on?

What do we mean by the “life” of animals, vegetables, and minerals in the medieval and early modern worlds?

As Laurie Shannon has noted, writers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance tend not to speak of “life” but of “lives.” This plural form certainly appeals to those of us who wish to resist making of “life” a universal abstract exchange value. But what exactly do we pluralize when we speak of “lives” rather than “life” – singular living entities, individual conceptions of “life,” otherwise homogeneous taxonomic categories?

How might the phrase “nonhuman lives” potentally reify even as it admirably pluralizes the “nonhuman”?

What critical idiolects do we invoke when we refer to “nonhuman lives”?

“Nonhuman lives” might tap into the language of biopolitics, famously codified by Xavier Bichat, who in 1800 characterized life as “a habitual succession of assimilation and excretion.” Bichat’s conception of life draws loosely on Aristotle’s conception of nutritive life as diminished in relation to higher forms of animal and human life. And this distinction itself resonates with the well-known Greek hierarchy of zoe – or bare life – and bios – or life proper to the polis, an ordering that Giorgio Agamben sees as crucial to the crypto-theological constitution of modernity. How may “lives” in the plural implicitly presume a distinction between the meaningful and the negligible life?

“Nonhuman lives” might also suggest Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s influential conceptions of object biographies as they move from one arena of valuation to another. Are “lives,” then, diachronic extensions through space and time of individual entities – like Eleanor of Acquitaine’s vase and Emperor Frederick’s exotic animals (as discussed by Sharon Kinoshita) – or of entity-producing practices (as in Carla Nappi’s account of cotton-ification and China-fication?)

“Nonhuman lives” might presume less diachronic extension through time than forms of agency. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s accounts of vibrant matter and the hoard, we can think of nonhuman things as participants in the course of action waiting to be given a figuration, communicating with other actants. Things, in Bennett’s words, call us. But if things call, will we come?

What do all these understandings of nonhuman lives do to our conceptions of time, chronology and period, including the very terms “medieval” and “early modern”?

Diamonds are forever, the saying goes. The geological time that compresses carbon into adamant and eventually a diamond crystal is almost inconceivably long; the millions of years that it takes to produce a diamond make our conception of period, or even Fernand Braudel’s longue duree, seem impossibly short. As Manuel De Landa notes in his discussion of non-organic life in A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, periods are simply local strata in larger “glacial” temporalities that include the flows of lava, biomass, genes, memes, norms. And yet our restratifications of those flows do possess a historicity according to specific logics of production. Diamonds are forever, but the social life of the blood diamond that comes from modern Sierra Leone differs from that of the bloody diamond that comes from Sir John Mandeville’s medieval India, retrieved by a swooping eagle from the bottom of a canyon on a slab of animal meat thrown by the eagle’s handler. Each presumes different modes of supply, labor, exchange, and even imaginative possibility. How, then, do nonhuman lives ask us both to dispense with human history and to recognize the impossibility of doing so?

How do the terms “nonhuman” and “lives” invite us to think of their nominal opposites?

Death may seem to be the opposite of, and excluded from, life. Yet in medieval and early modern theology all living matter was potentially considered dead. This wholesale mortification was resisted in various vitalist traditions, which understood seemingly dead matter as heterodox forms of sublunary life possessed of “virtue,” as Valerie Allen’s discussion of Albertus Magnus reminded us. And, as Karl Steel pointed out, the phrase “dead matter” presumes that it must have once been alive for it to die. How, then, should we understand death in relation to nonhuman lives?

The nonhuman would seem to presume the human. What is the status of the human once the nonhuman becomes an object of analysis?

Thomas Nagel advocates that humans should imaginatively attempt to become the bat they cannot be; the Renaissance poet George Vaughan asks his readers to acknowledge the vital vegetal life that we all possess; Geoffrey Chaucer, as Kellie Robertson reminded us, imagined himself as iron between two magnets. Are such imaginative acts of becoming-nonhuman antihumanist, posthumanist, neohumanist?

Lupine/sylvan children (Karl Steel); petromorphic prosopopoeia (Kellie Robertson); anthropofloral hospitality (Peggy McCracken); co-implicated interdependence/astral projection (Eileen A. Joy); sheepish sidetracks (Julian Yates). What are the ethics of such nonhuman becomings?

Heinrich Nolle has suggested that “humans ape plants.” More specifically, we have seen maidens ape flowers in Peggy McCracken’s paper. What happens – as the syntax of Nolle’s phrase invites us to do – when we start thinking of humans and nonhumans in terms of networks (or meshes, to use Timothy Morton’s term) that conjoin multiple actants?

Take the Bezoar stone. Edmund Scott certainly did. In his 1603 treatise An Exact Discourse … of the East Indians, Scott refers to the Bezoar stone as one of the most hotly coveted commodities in Java. This seeming mineral was of unusual provenance: it was a carbuncle excised from the intestine of an animal, usually a goat, and was believed to be caused by eating too much persimmon fruit. The Bezoar stone was believed also to possess miraculous medicinal powers: it was traditionally ingested by the European traveler to combat the noxious effects of the pathogenic vapors she inhaled in the hot and humid climate of Java. So what is the Bezoar stone, and what are its lives – Animal, Vegetable, Mineral …

Human?

AVMEO: Images for Bennett's "Powers of the Hoard"

2011-03-09T12:09:00.036-05:00

As you know, Jane Bennett's AVMEO keynote address is free and open to the public.

She has asked me to post images from her address ahead of time (see below). Please acquaint yourself with them now, for they will not be displayed during lecture.

Just a reminder: the event takes place this Friday 3/11 in Room 309 of the Marvin Center (800 21st St. NW).

“Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency”

Though there are historical concepts to draw from in the history of philosophy, a distinctively contemporary vocabulary for a world of thing-power is still in the making, at least within the humanities and social sciences. In the talk, I try to add to that vocabulary, primarily by examining what hoarders -- considered as people who are preternaturally attuned to things -- have to teach us. This idiolect is directed not toward capturing the things outside of us but toward changing our own sense-perception, tuning it toward the frequencies of the thing-powers within and around our bodies. How to render the self more susceptible to the non-linguistic communicability between vibrant materials? I seek also to critically assess the theory of "thing-power" and the "agency of assemblages" that I pursued in Vibrant Matter by engaging some more trash, indeed a whole hoard.

AVMEO: Friday!

2011-03-07T08:53:00.000-05:00

Although registration for the conference has been closed, the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute invites you to attend the Friday sessions at the Marvin Center (800 21st St NW). These sessions are free and welcome anyone who wishes to attend.

The complete schedule may be found here. The Friday schedule appears below. Friday sessions will be held on the GW Campus, at the Marvin Center.
--------------

9-10:30
Plenary I

Animal
Marvin Center 309
Moderator and Opening Remarks: Jeffrey J. Cohen, GW
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College): "With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse"
Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz): "Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire"

11-12:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Talking Animals
Marvin Center 404
Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita, University of California

1. Patricia Har (Cornell University): "More Life: Animal Encounters in the South English Legendary"

2. Eleonora Stoppino (University of Illinois): "Learning from Monkeys: A Feral Child in Fifteenth-Century Florence"

3. Sara Gutmann (University at Buffalo): "Chaucer’s Chicks: Ascetic Feminism in The Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls "

II. Object Agency
Marvin Center 309
Moderator: Valerie Allen, John Jay College

1. Ben C. Tilghman (Independent Scholar): "The Object Speaks: Prosopopoeia and Objects as Actants in the Early Medieval Period"

2. Liz Angello (University of South Florida): "Tarquin's Prick"

3. Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria): "Toy Materialism"

III. Book Power
Marvin Center 310
Moderator: Julian Yates, University of Delaware

1. Whitney Anne Trettien (Duke University): "So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires”: Nehemiah Grew's Biblio-botany"

2. Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University): "Creative Regeneration: Translingual Mediation, Organic Form, and Multilingual Merchant Miscellanies"

3. Myra Seaman (College of Charleston): "Objects of Forgiveness in MS Ashmole 61"

2-3:30
Plenary II

Mineral
Marvin Center 309
Moderator: Holly Dugan, GW

Kellie Robertson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): "Exemplary Rocks"

Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Criminal Justice): "Mineral Virtue"

4-5:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Metals/Stone/Architecture
Marvin Center 404
Moderator: Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia

1. Cristina Pangilinan (Vanderbilt University): "Hoccleve and “Feoble Money”"

2. Shannon Meyer (University of California, Santa Barbara): "Tours,
Bours, Linens and Ladies: Accessing the Female Body in the Clerical Imaginary of Medieval England"

3. Jaime Marroquín (George Washington University): "When Science and Literature Were One: The Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España by Bernardino de Sahagún"

II. Faith, Objects and Orientations (sponsored by GW MEMSI)
Marvin Center 309
Moderator: J. Gil Harris, GW

1. Haylie Swenson (George Washington University): "Marvelously Possessed: Human-Animal Interactions in Travel Narratives of the New World"

2. Mark Bychowski (George Washington University): "Christ on the Cross-dresser: Transgendered Images of God and Performativity as a Sign of Devotion”

3. Erica Carson (George Washington University): “The Sodomidical-Lesbian Kitchen: Subjects of Conversion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament”

4. Laura Feigin (George Washington University): "Paradise Peppered: The Spicy Search for the Path to Paradise in Milton's Paradise Lost and Early Modern Travel Narrative"

5. Theodora Danylevich (George Washington University): “Becoming-Eucharist and the (Homo)erotic Kitchen of Conversion: Exploring ‘Cokkys Peyn’ in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and The Book of Margery Kempe”

III. Ethics
Marvin Center 310
Moderator: Kellie Robertson, University of Wisconsin

1. Alex Brey (Bryn Mawr College): "Deconstructing Mshatta: A Case Study in the Ethics of Medieval and Modern Architectural Reuse"

2. Jessica Rosenberg (University of Pennsylvania): "Vegetable ethics and the work of instruction in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Thomas Wilson’s ‘Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage’"

3. Rob Wakeman (University of Maryland): “Ben Jonson in Lubberland: Slaughterhouse Ethics and Bartholomew Fair”

6:00 Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), keynote address: "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency."
Marvin Center 309
Introduction: Jeffrey J. Cohen, GW
Professor Bennett's keynote address is made possible through the generous support of the Wang Endowed Fund in English Literature and Literary Studies.

Alex Huang Visits GW 3/3

2011-02-28T12:01:00.005-05:00

On Thursday March 3, Professor Alex Huang of Penn State University will be visiting the GW campus to deliver a lecture on "Global Shakespeare 2.0" at 4 PM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW).

He will also be leading a one-hour seminar with Q&A specifically for GW graduate students earlier in the day at 2 PM in Duques Hall 361 (2201 G St. NW).

Professor Huang is a rising star in Shakespeare studies and globalization. He is the co-editor of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, and the co-editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook; most recently, he has won the prestigious 2010 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Comparative Literature Prize from the MLA for his book Chinese Shakespeares. He is also the recipient of a major Digital Humanities grant on Global Shakespeares.

You can learn more about Prof. Huang from his beautifully designed website. Mark your calendar!

Book Launch Celebration 2/24

2011-02-07T20:20:00.003-05:00

Thursday, 2/24 at 4PM: Celebrate with us new publications by Gil Harris (George Washington University) and Madhavi Menon (American University). Professor Harris's book, Shakespeare and Literary Theory, was recently published by Oxford UP and Professor Menon's edited collection, Shakesqueer, was just released by Duke UP.

Light refreshments will be served.

The event takes place in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW).

Maghan Keita Lunch Seminar 2/11

2011-01-31T17:25:00.004-05:00

Friday, 2/11 at 12 PM marks our second lunch seminar of the semester. Maghan Keita will be joining us, Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. His research areas include African, African-American, European, and World Histories; Political Economy; and Development Studies.

His two essays -- "Missing Chapters in Afro-Medievalism, or What the Bookstore Hid" and "Power and Beauty: The Pleasures and Dangers of Blackness in Medieval and Renaissance Representations" -- are available for circulation. A light lunch will be served. The seminar will be held in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW).

Please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] if you wish to attend. I have listed several of his publications below. Much more information about Professor Keita may be found at his Villanova homepage.

We hope to see you on the 11th!

Conceptualizing/Re-conceptualizing Africa: The Construction of African Historical Identity, Editor, (Leiden: Brill, 2002)

Riddling the Sphinx. Race, the Writing of history, and America's Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press)

"The African Contribution to Western Civilization," The Pan-Africanist Journal ( 1998).

"Deconstructing the Classical Age: Africa and the Unity of the Mediterranean World," The Journal of Negro History, LXXIX, 2 (Spring 1994).

"Linking Pre-Colonial Africa and Pre-Columbian America: the Implications and the Impact on Old World/New World Scholarship," in N. Sudarkasa, ed., The African-American Experience: a Multidisciplinary Approach, (New York: Harper Collins, 1994)

"Deconstruction and Reconstruction: Africa and Medieval and Renaissance History," The Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 16 (Fall 1993).

Updated MEMSI Spring Events

2011-01-27T00:03:00.005-05:00

Join us over the next few months for:

1) Friday, 2/11 at 12 PM: Maghan Keita (Villanova) lunch seminar. His two essays -- "Missing Chapters in Afro-Medievalism, or What the Bookstore Hid" and "Power and Beauty: The Pleasures and Dangers of Blackness in Medieval and Renaissance Representations" -- are already available for circulation. Please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] if you wish to attend.

2) Thursday, 2/24 at 4 PM: Book launch celebration for Gil Harris (George Washington University) and Madhavi Menon (American University). Professor Harris's book, Shakespeare and Literary Theory, was recently published by Oxford UP and Professor Menon's edited collection, Shakesqueer, was just released by Duke UP.

3) Friday 3/11 and Saturday 3/12: Our massive conference, "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods."

4) Friday, 4/1 at 9 AM: Suzanne Miller (George Washington University) breakfast seminar. "Christiano non dicam rectore sed fidei perversore: Episcopal Resistance to Outside Rule in the North Adriatic and in Europe, c. 1100-1350." The paper is pre-circulated. Again, please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] if you wish to attend.

All events (except the AVMEO conference) take place in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW). As each date approaches, I will post more information about the event on the blog.

Hope to see you at all four!

GW MEMSI @ IMC Kalamazoo

2011-01-22T07:06:00.001-05:00

We hope to see you at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in exotic Kalamazoo Michigan this May. Here's the line up for our sponsored panel.

Objects, Networks, and Materiality (A Roundtable)

Thursday 10am, Session 21, Fetzer 1005

Organized and Presided over by Jeffrey Cohen, and Sponsored by GW MEMSI

"A Parliament of Things?" Laurie A. Finke
"Things without Faces" Julie Orlemanski
"Medieval Nets" Valerie Allen
"Passionate Matter" Elizabeth Blake
"Remediating Matter" Kellie Robertson
"The Ice Age Is Never Over" Lowell Duckert

Other panels of interest can be found here.

Drew Daniel @ GW 1/28

2011-01-14T13:20:00.005-05:00

The first MEMSI event of 2011 is a lunch seminar with Drew Daniel, Assistant Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where he will discuss his pre-circulated paper "Striking the French Match: Jean Bodin, Queen Elizabeth I, and the Occultation of Sovereign Marriage." The event takes place in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW) at 12 PM on Friday, January 28th.

Please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] and I will send you the paper. A light lunch will be served.

Daniel's publications range across Elizabethan drama, contemporary film, and the musical avant-garde. In 2008 Continuum Press published his first book, a study of the English “industrial” music pioneers Throbbing Gristle titled Twenty Jazz Funk Greats. His essay “Striking the French Match” is a contribution to a book project, conceived and co-edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton and Graham Hammill, called Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scenes of Early Modernity. More information about our guest may be found at JHU's website. We hope to see you on the 28th.

GW MEMSI Spring Events 2011

2011-01-05T17:39:00.002-05:00

Happy new year from the GW Medieval and Early Modern Institute. Please mark your calendar for these spring events.

Friday January 28 at noon: lunch seminar with Drew Daniel, Assistant Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University. Professor Daniel's paper "Striking the French Match: Jean Bodin, Queen Elizabeth I, and the Occultation of Sovereign Marriage" will be circulated two weeks ahead of time. A light lunch will be served. You must RSVP to Lowell Duckert (lduckert@gwu.edu) if you would like to attend.
Friday Februray 11 at noon: lunch seminar with Maghan Keita, Professor of History, Villanova University. Professor Keita's essays "Missing Chapters in Afro-Medievalism, or What the Bookstore Hid" and "Power and Beauty: The Pleasures and Dangers of Blackness in Medieval and Renaissance Representations." A light lunch will be served. You must RSVP if you would like to attend; a reminder email will be sent closer to the date.
March 11-12: The GW MEMSI conference "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods." Information here, soon to be updated with registration information: http://www.gwmemsi.com/p/conference-page.html

As more events are added they will be emailed to our distribution list and posted to the blog.

Thanks for your support during the autumn semester, and we look forward to seeing you in the spring.

You still have time ...

2010-12-30T07:18:00.003-05:00

You still have time to support our annual drive. Your support makes an immediate and lasting impact upon the study of the past. On behalf of our students and faculty, THANK YOU.

AVMEO Program

2010-12-13T14:30:00.006-05:00

Registration is now open for our conference "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," March 11-12, 2011. Please register immediately to avoid disappointment.

Friday sessions take place on the GW Campus, at the Marvin Center. Saturday's sessions will be held nearby, at the Hotel Lombardy. This hotel is also the best place to stay for the conference if you are coming in from out of town. Rooms are spacious and recently renovated, and the Venetian Room on its first floor is the Official Lounge of the conference. Rooms are available at the conference rate of $179 night when you call (202) 828-2600 and mention group number #2277.

For directions to the Hotel Lombardy from Union Station and nearby airports, please contact Lowell Duckert [lduckert@gwu.edu].

To cover the costs of catering and room rentals, the conference will charge a registration fee of $45 ($25 for graduate students). All sessions of concurrent papers on Friday and Jane Bennett's keynote lecture are, however, free and welcome anyone who wishes to attend. You do NOT need to register if you are attending only the free events on Friday.

REGISTRATION: You must register to attend the conference (except for the Friday sessions that are open to the public). The registration fee covers coffee, snacks and a reception with drinks and food Friday, and breakfast, coffee, snacks and lunch Saturday. You are also invited to join us for the conference dinner on Saturday evening; the fee of $15 includes both food and beverages. Details of the dinner will be announced soon, but we expect to hold the feast at a nearby Indian restaurant. You should register using your credit card and the button below:

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

For abstracts of the plenary sessions, see this page.

FRIDAY MARCH 11

All sessions at the GW Marvin Center

9-10:30

Animal

Marvin Center 309
Moderator and Opening Remarks: Jeffrey J. Cohen, GW

Karl Steel (Brooklyn College): "With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse"

Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz): "Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire"

11-12:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Talking Animals

Marvin Center 404

Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita, University of California

1. Patricia Har (Cornell University): "More Life: Animal Encounters in the South English Legendary"

2. Eleonora Stoppino (University of Illinois): "Learning from Monkeys: A Feral Child in Fifteenth-Century Florence"

3. Sara Gutmann (University at Buffalo): "Chaucer’s Chicks: Ascetic Feminism in The Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls "

II. Object Agency

Marvin Center 309

Moderator: Valerie Allen, John Jay College

1. Ben C. Tilghman (Independent Scholar): "The Object Speaks: Prosopopoeia and Objects as Actants in the Early Medieval Period"

2. Liz Angello (University of South Florida): "Tarquin's Prick"

3. Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria): "Toy Materialism"

III. Book Power

Marvin Center 310

Moderator: Julian Yates, University of Delaware

1. Whitney Anne Trettien (Duke University): "So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires”: Nehemiah Grew's Biblio-botany"

2. Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University): "Creative Regeneration: Translingual Mediation, Organic Form, and Multilingual Merchant Miscellanies"

3. Myra Seaman (College of Charleston): "Objects of Forgiveness in MS Ashmole 61"

12:30-2 Lunch

2-3:30

Mineral

Marvin Center 309
Moderator: Holly Dugan, GW

Kellie Robertson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): "Exemplary Rocks"

Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Criminal Justice): "Mineral Virtue"

4-5:30

Concurrent Sessions

I. Metals/Stone/Architecture

Marvin Center 404

Moderator: Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia

1. Cristina Pangilinan (Vanderbilt University): "Hoccleve and “Feoble Money”"

2. Shannon Meyer (University of California, Santa Barbara): "Tours, Bours, Linens and Ladies: Accessing the Female Body in the Clerical Imaginary of Medieval England"

3. Jaime Marroquín (George Washington University): "When Science and Literature Were One: The Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España by Bernardino de Sahagún"

II. Faith, Objects and Orientations (sponsored by GW MEMSI)

Marvin Center 309

Moderator: J. Gil Harris, GW

1. Haylie Swenson (George Washington University): "Marvelously Possessed: Human-Animal Interactions in Travel Narratives of the New World""

2. Mark Bychowski (George Washington University): "Christ on the Cross-dresser: Transgendered Images of God and Performativity as a Sign of Devotion”

3. Erica Carson (George Washington University): “The Sodomidical-Lesbian Kitchen: Subjects of Conversion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament”

4. Laura Feigin (George Washington University): "Paradise Peppered: The Spicy Search for the Path to Paradise in Milton's Paradise Lost and Early Modern Travel Narrative"

III. Ethics

Marvin Center 310

Moderator: Kellie Robertson, University of Wisconsin

1. Alex Brey (Bryn Mawr College): "Deconstructing Mshatta: A Case Study in the Ethics of Medieval and Modern Architectural Reuse"

2. Jessica Rosenberg (University of Pennsylvania): "Vegetable ethics and the work of instruction in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Thomas Wilson’s ‘Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage’"

3. Rob Wakeman (University of Maryland): “Ben Jonson in Lubberland: Slaughterhouse Ethics and Bartholomew Fair”

6:00 Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), keynote address: "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency." Open to all who wish to attend.

Marvin Center 309

Introduction: Jeffrey J. Cohen, GW

Professor Bennett's keynote address is made possible through the generous support of the Wang Endowed Fund in English Literature and Literary Studies.

7:30 Reception (for registered conference participants)

SATURDAY MARCH 12

(Hotel Lombardy)

Sessions open to registered conference participants.

8-9:30 Catered breakfast

Fortuny Room

9:30-11:00 Concurrent Sessions

I. Dark Materials

International Room

Moderator: Karl Steel, Brooklyn College CUNY

Eleanor Kaufman (University of California, Los Angeles): "From Nutritive Souls to Mineral Souls"
Denise Albanese (George Mason University): "From Natural History to Biography: The Social Life of the Early Modern Atom"
Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University): "Black Bile: Object, “Quasi-Object”, or Assemblage?"

II. Wondrous Cosmology: Physics, Poetics, Biology (sponsored by postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies)

Board Room

Moderator: Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan

Liza Blake (New York University): "Golding’s Metamorphic Physis and the Meaning of Matter"
Anna Klosowska (University of Miami, Ohio): "Madeleine de l’Aubespine’s Baroque Metamorphoses after Post-Phenomenology"
Daniel C. Remein (New York University): "Towards a Poetics of Ornamentality and Wonder: Things and Physis in the Old English Riddles at the Crux of Empiricism and Phenomenology"
Ada Smailbegovic (New York University): "From Osmotic Crystallizations to the Folds of the Microvilli: The Poetics of Surface Elaboration as Affective Amplification"

11:30-1:00

Vegetable

International Room

Moderator: Jonathan Hsy, GW

Carla Nappi (University of British Columbia): "You Don’t Mess With The Yohan: Cotton, Objects, and Becoming Vegetal in Early Modern China"

Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan): "Flower Girls"

1-2 Catered lunch

Fortuny Room

2-3:30 Concurrent Sessions

I. Fuck Nature

International Room

Moderator: Eileen Joy, Southern Illinois University

Joseph Campana (Rice University): "Animal, Vegetable, Child: Futures of the History of Sexuality"
Holly Dugan (George Washington University): '"Rude, Raw, and Muddy': Playing Ape in Early Modern England'"
Vin Nardizzi (University of British Columbia): "Tree Huggers and Other Philodendrists in Early Modern Poetry"

II. Consider the Creature

Board Room

Moderator: Julia Reinard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

Rebecca Davis (University of California, Irvine): “‘Cristes creature’: The Exposed Soul in Piers Plowman”
Donovan Sherman (University of California, Irvine): “Anti-Memorials: Flesh and Soul in Coriolanus”

4-5:30

Ethics

International Room

Moderator: Madhavi Menon, American University

Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville): "The Middle Voice, Vicarious Causation, and Natality: A Manifesto"

Julian Yates (University of Delaware): "Sheep Tracks"

6:00

Objects and Endings

International Room

Moderator (and Concludor): J. Gil Harris, GW

Julia Reinard Lupton (University of California, Irvine): "Of Chairs, Stools and Trestle Tables: Scenes from the Renaissance Res Publica of Things"

7 PM CONFERENCE DINNER AT RASOI (1810 K Street N.W.)

Please Support GW MEMSI

2010-11-29T06:00:00.006-05:00

[Donate Online Now]

Dear Friend,

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Institute institute was founded in 2008 by nine faculty members in English, History and Romance Languages. We have quickly grown to include sixteen professors and numerous students in five departments, making us the largest humanities initiative at the George Washington University.

Our mission is to bring fresh critical perspectives to the study of the literature and culture of early Europe. Appropriate to our location within a global city, we emphasize the international character of the period: the connections that entangled England and France with the North Sea, the Celtic world, the Mediterranean and the New World. We have a deep and abiding respect for well known authors such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, and we research and teach them alongside the texts that they read and loved: narratives of travel to China, India, Jerusalem; adventures on the seas and along pilgrimage routes; stories of magic, possibility, loss, and transformation.

Our goal is to ensure that the writings of the medieval and early modern periods are granted the same capaciousness and ambition as more contemporary texts. We never conduct this work in isolation, finding vital partners in programs like Africana Studies and Latino Studies. Thus our panel on Shakespeare’s Tempest included experts speaking about the ways in which the play has been re-written by Caribbean and African authors. We also ensure that our work is available to all, from undergraduates in introductory courses to the graduate students who will someday write field-changing books and teach the next generation of students. Every event we sponsor is free and open to all who wish to attend.

Through a partnership with the School Without Walls, our undergraduate course on "Myths of Britain" brings Shakespeare and Beowulf to Washington’s most ambitious high school students. GW undergraduates of all majors take courses with us, and attend our events. Our “Gateway Lecture” series has proven a popular entryway into the best research being done on the medieval and early modern periods. Examining topics as diverse as ecological approaches to early literature, postcolonial studies and epic, the Order of the Garter, and Shakespeare’s Tempest as a maritime text, these lectures have typically attracted between sixty and eighty undergraduate students, as well as interested persons from around the DC area. The speakers have then had the chance to have an informal dinner with our graduate students, contributing to their professional training. Through our advanced seminars, we train those who will become learned experts and passionate teachers. We are proud of our record of accomplishment in this our third year of being chartered.

We have also been able to support the research of our award-winning faculty, who have been extraordinarily successful in obtaining the grants and fellowships that boost our international ranking. Our published research fosters a deep and lasting regard for the texts and cultures of the past. We believe strongly that this kind of keen engagement with history can help to bring about a better future.

And yet there is so much more that we would like to be able to undertake: a lively program for bringing scholars to GW for long term residencies; an undergraduate course that enables our students to spend a portion of the class abroad visiting the locations that they study; mentored postdoctoral teaching opportunities for our graduate students as they hone their classroom skills and prepare themselves for the difficult humanities job market; a revitalized undergraduate major and minor; an expanded program of public lectures; better support for faculty in the final stages of completing book projects; the launching of a new line of electronic books with the Institute’s imprimatur that would make access to primary and secondary texts immediate and inexpensive; a deeper alliance with the Folger Shakespeare Library. And more. Please check out our website and judge our record – and our intended future -- for yourself. If you see an event that appeals to you, take this as your personal invitation to attend.

We would also ask that you keep us in mind as the year comes to its close and you think about your annual giving. Every penny of philanthropic support for GW MEMSI goes directly towards our programs. Contributing is easy. You may donate online here (please check the box for “Other” and designate “GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute”). You may also donate by telephone (800-789-2611) or by mailing a check to The George Washington University, 2100 M Street, NW, Suite 310, Washington, D.C. 20052 (please designate the Institute on the memo line or in an accompanying note). As director of the Institute, I am happy to speak with you about any particular initiative that intrigues you. I can be reached easily by email (jjcohen@gwu.edu) or telephone (202 455-8157).

I am certain that you receive many requests for your time and support. I thank you for reading this note. It is, quite simply, a letter composed by someone who has been teaching medieval and early modern studies at GW for sixteen years, has seen the lives of his students deepened and sometimes even transformed by what they study, and whose passion is to ensure that this work flourishes at the George Washington University for a very long time.

Yours sincerely,

Jeffrey J. Cohen

Professor of English
Director, GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute

Rereading The Tempest, or TemFest II

2010-11-08T07:50:00.000-05:00

The GW Africana Studies Program, Latino Studies Program, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute are proud to sponsor in partnership two events that focus upon William Shakespeare's The Tempest and its legacies. You may read some background here, and see the program for TemFest I here.

Rereading the Tempest

a panel discussion open to all

Friday December 3

3 PM

1957 E Street Room B12

A panel of renowned scholars will speak about the afterlife of the play, sharing their own research and holding a lively public conversation. For a general audience; all are welcome. Featuring:

Anston Bosman, "Accident and Amazement in recent Tempests"

Anston Bosman is Associate Professor and Director of Studies in the English Department at Amherst College. His publications this year include a review essay in Shakespeare Quarterly on the British-South African production of The Tempest and the chapter on "Shakespeare and Globalization" in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. He is completing a book on transnational theater in the early modern Germanic world and a collaborative project on "Intertheatricality" with Gina Bloom (UC Davis) and Will West (Northwestern).

Steve Mentz, "The Void in The Tempest"

Steve Mentz is Associate Professor of English at St. John's University in New York City. His recent work on maritime literary culture includes the book At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (Continuum, 2009) and a gallery exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, "Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 - 1750." He has also written a study of Elizabethan prose fiction, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006) and co-edited a collection about early modern criminality, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Michigan, 2004). Works in progress include a study of shipwreck narratives and a co-edited collection on Thomas Nashe.

J Michael Dash, "Ariel's Isle, Caribbean Rewritings of The Tempest"

J. Michael Dash, Professor of French and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is a leading scholar in the fields of Caribbean and Francophone literatures. Dash is the author of two of the most influential works of Caribbean cultural history, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Literature and Ideology in Haiti: 1915-1961(MacMillan, 1981). He has also written many other notable works, including Haiti and the United States (MacMillan, 1997) and a study of the Martiniquan writer Edouard Glissant (Cambridge University Press, 1995). His most recent study, Culture and Customs of Haiti, appeared in 2001 (Greenwood Press).

Both events are free and welcome all who wish to attend.
Please join us!

AVMEO Update

2010-11-06T07:39:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to the thirty seven scholar who submitted paper and panel proposals for the upcoming GW MEMSI conference Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.

We are currently hard at wqork sorting through the proposals and attempting to create a cohesive conference program. We hope to notify all would-be participants by the middle of next week.

Thank you for your patience!

"Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects" Plenary Session Abstracts

2010-10-10T17:16:00.017-04:00

Our speakers' topics for the "AVMEO" conference next March are:

Animal

Karl Steel

"With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf Child of Hesse"

"Hic deprehensus lignis circumligatis erectus ire ad humanam similitudinem cogebatur"
(When he was captured, he was bound with wood and compelled to go upright in the manner of a human)

My paper follows a Hessian boy into the woods to witness a temporary posthuman alliance of human, lupine, and sylvan subject/objects. A fourteenth-century entry in the Chronicle of St Peter of Erfurt tell the story of the child, captured and raised by wolves, then captured again several years later, this time by humans, who displayed him at a noble court as a spectacle. The wolves had cherished the child, giving him the best food, excavating a den for him, sheltering him with their bodies in the winter, and teaching him to run on all fours and to jump; his human captors, scandalized by the child's posture, affixed wooded braces to him to compel him to walk upright. As the captured child himself tells it, he much preferred his time with the wolves.

Per medieval humanist interpretations of posture, the child had gone from being with the world and its mutability to looking upright, toward the sky and its eternal truths. One posture has child among the woods and the wolves, who learn from him too, the whole of them forming a sylvan network to offer a lived rethinking of facile oppositions between wolf and human and between sentient subject and worldly object; another, corrective posture dreams of an isolated body released from mutability, in which the child would be one of a set of sealed-off human subjects. Given over to the court, captured and disconnected, bound to a future that looks up and not around, it is no wonder that the child longs to be sylvan again.

Sharon Kinoshita

"Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire"

Most Animal Studies approaches to the Middle Ages have in some degree been concerned with the ways medieval texts put the category of “animal” in conversation with the category of “the human,” as in the case of the morphing protagonists of “Bisclavret” and “Yonec” in the Lais of Marie de France. My talk shifts the focus to animals as objects of exchange in the medieval culture of empire, considering historical examples and literary representations of how centrally animals such as camels or falcons figured in the construction of a courtly culture that, in the midst of the age of crusades, cut across political and confessional boundaries in the Mediterranean and beyond.

Mineral

Kellie Robertson

"Exemplary Rocks"

Rocks were good to think with in the later Middle Ages. They were regularly used as examples in scholastic philosophy for analyzing the limit conditions of cognition. The motion of rocks was often cited as evidence for the charisma of place in medieval physics, a doctrine that allowed inanimate objects the luxury of quasi-animate properties. In these ways, rocks played an exemplary role in helping to generate the epistemological systems that underwrote much scholastic thought about the material world. This paper charts a wandering itinerary between the rocks of natural philosophy and the hard places of late medieval poetry. Stops on this itinerary will (most likely) include Dorigen’s meditation on the “grisly black rocks” of the Franklin’s Tale and the climactic metaphor in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that compares Gawain himself to a rock. In exploring how the “exemplary rock” came to be seen as emblematic of relations between the material and immaterial worlds for both poets and natural philosophers, I’ll argue for a shared epistemology between late medieval fiction-writing and physics, one that, unlike post-Enlightenment systems of knowledge, did not of necessity cordon off the human from the natural nor see the human as the centripetal center around which the non-sentient converged. Such a historical imaginary does not see the rock-human assemblage as a nostalgic, narcissistic closeness to nature but rather suggests that a particular historical understanding can be recuperated through the transformative potential of feminist ecological thinking, a historical inquiry conditioned by “locational possibilities” (in the words of critic Lorraine Code) that allow us to follow the epistemic possibilities precipitating out of medieval rocks.

Valerie Allen

"Mineral Virtue"

When we speak of the virtues of a gemstone or mineral we use the word in an archaic sense drawn from vitalist thought, and mean something different from the current ethical usage of doing the right thing. We seem to stretch the language of moral philosophy too far to imply that inorganic matter can act, yet scholastic philosophy moves without changing register between discussions of the powers of stones and of souls. Drawing from scholastic philosophy on the one hand and late-medieval testamentary bequests on the other, I consider the “virtues” of medieval stones, amulets, and inscribed objects, asking how they participate in the daily acts of ordinary folk, devout and unlearned. In what ways do such objects participate in the ethical life of their medieval owners?

Vegetable

Carla Nappi

"You Don’t Mess With The Yohan: Cotton, Objects, and Becoming Vegetal in Early Modern China"

As living objects go, plants seem relatively unproblematic: they tend to stay put, they seem easy to identify, and we create histories that trace their roles through vast cuts of time. Trees, fruits, herbs, and vegetables were the primary components of most medicinal drugs in early modern China, and the historical and literary work on Chinese food and medicine is lush with plant life.

Vitally important as an ingredient in pharmacy, an object of tribute and trade, a raw material for manufacture, and a curiosity of natural history, cotton has been identified and threaded through Chinese natural history from early accounts of vegetable lambs, to lists of tribute plants and fabrics in bilingual dictionaries, to early modern agricultural accounts, and through references to yohan and kubun armor in Manchu sources. My paper uses this case study to explore what it means to write with and of plants in early modern history. Addressing the challenges of writing a materially-informed diachronic narrative from a collection of names, descriptions, stories, texts, and materials that have been pieced together in different ways (and in multiple languages) over time, I will argue that the history of the vegetal is itself a process of objectification, creating the very concept that it purports to study. The paper will conclude by suggesting that we consider the early modern vegetable in terms of a history of sameness and identification, historicizing the notions of interchangeability and replaceability as manifest in plant knowledge in multilingual China.

Peggy McCracken

“Flower girls”

This paper will focus on the Roman d’Alexandre (Alexandre de Paris version) and the stunning episode in which Alexander and his men enter a garden of plenitude and encounter the women who live there as flowers. Or as women who metamorphose into flowers. Or as women who are part flower and part human. Or as part-flower women who eagerly invite sex with Alexandre’s men and then become virgins (again?), since one of the virtues of the garden is to restore virginity. The difficulty of describing exactly what these beings are will be my starting point, and I will situate this human-vegetal being (but is that what it is?) in relation to the automata that guard the entrance to the garden, the conquerer who enters the garden, and the virtues of the plants in the garden in order to ask how embodiment matters in this episode, what kind of embodiment matters, and why.

Ethics

Eileen Joy

"The Middle Voice, Vicarious Causation, and Natality: A Manifesto"

Drawing upon Jane Bennett's Birbeck Humanities Center lecture, "Walt Whitman's Solar Judgment," as well as Thomas Carlson's The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Creation of the Human (Chicago, 2008), Claude Romano's "evential hermeneutics," and Graham Harman's "guerrilla metaphysics," my talk will attempt to address the ethical (or, poethical) role of the human in navigating and traveling along what Bennett has termed the "charged pathways" between the vibrant materiality of things and the materiality of emotional (and human) responsivity to these things. If, as Jeffrey Cohen has argued, following Bennett, that matter "possesses aesthetic, affective and practical agencies," and that the world "unfolds through our alliances with a lively materialism, where we are one actant among many within a turbulent identity network," then what sorts of ethical considerations might now come into play that do not assume the human as sovereign within this network, nor this network as orderly, fixed, or providentially designed? Further, what might be the role of aesthetic agency, or poetics (human and non/human), in crafting alliances across the synapses of this network in order to give better "voice" to what Bennett has called the "messily reciprocal coalescences of heterogeneous forces"? Finally, what might still be "special" about the human in this network, and why does that ultimately matter when the times comes, as Julian Yates has written, to determine the "nature" of the "call" of the post/human, especially when, as premodernists, we are "disseminating stories about the textual traces named past." My touchstone medieval text for my remarks will be the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle.

Julian Yates

"Sheep Auras: On Counting, Theft, and a Kine/Aesthetics that is not one"

This paper proceeds on the assumption that any engagement with questions of matter / materiality / or the lives of animals / plants / fungi / things ought to prove so unsettling that it will tend to jeopardize our ability to produce vendible narratives about past and present. For me the question of matter figures as one of discursive exposure and narrative risk, that will tend to play out as a re-grounding in questions of the archive, of genre, and rhetoric understood now as technologies for rendering things mobile. I read the turn to biography (Appadurai, Kopytoff) as the default genre for studies of things (and their social lives) and the assumption of life and its codes as the constitutive “as if” that enables analysis as the symptom of a retro-humanist impulse that renders matter infinitely malleable in human hands. I am concerned also, however, by the salvific lure (crypto-theology?) that the assimilation of actor network theory, speculative metaphysics, and the turn to “things” in literary and historical study more generally seems to offer (I’d dearly love to be wrong), modeling the world under the rubric of a figural human extinction that detonates issues of witness / testimony. This paper aims to slow things down and consider the genre and media-specificity of our engagements and to do so by investigating what the inventory (counting sheep) and theft (sheep – stealing), as genres whose orientation to a multiplicity (a life that is always many irreducible and incompatible lives) might have to offer us.

Objects

Julia Reinhard Lupton

"Of Chairs, Stools and Trestle Tables: Scenes from the Renaissance Res Publica of Things"

In this paper, I will examine the social arrangements that obtained among Renaissance home furnishings. Why were chairs rare and stools common? How was the political theology of chairs challenged by new forms of artisanal production? Why were some tables called “dormant” (and what was required to wake them up)? Why and how was animal life mapped onto the design and social organization of furniture? In what sense were stools, chairs and tables “actants” on the scene of Renaissance housing, especially in the socio-religious scripts of hospitality, holiday and that daily drama called dinner? And what does the Renaissance menagerie of furniture have to teach us today about the way we live with things? My readings of Renaissance furniture will draw on affordance theory, as developed in environmental psychology (James J. Gibson, Harry Heft, Timothy Ingold) and repurposed in design research (Donald Norman, Janet Suri, Brenda Laurel). Using a variety of materials, including paintings and plays, I will distinguish between the inventory (the concrete poetry of the object list) and the taskscape (the micro-drama of affordances in action) in order to draw out the secret constitutions governing the res publica of things in Renaissance domestic and theatrical space.

CFP Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (deadline nearing!)

2010-09-30T07:44:00.000-04:00

Deadline approaching!

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI) is sponsoring a conference on "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods." The conference will be held on Friday March 11 and Saturday March 12. The keynote lecture will be given by Jane Bennett. The five double plenary sessions include:
Animal
Karl Steel and Sharon Kinoshita
Mineral
Kellie Robertson and Valerie Allen
Vegetable
Carla Nappi and Peggy McCracken

Ethics
Eileen Joy and Julian Yates
Objects
Julia Reinhard Lupton

We hope that you will join us ... and that you will consider proposing a presentation. The deadline to submit a paper abstract or to propose a panel or round table is Friday October 15. You may email your submission to gwmemsi@gmail.com.

To maintain an intimate feel and to ensure that the conference conversations are coherent and sustained, participation in the event is limited to eighty. We hope to see you in Washington!

Summer Research Grants: The Results Are In

2010-09-15T08:50:00.001-04:00

We announced here that we were able, through the generosity of a donor, to support modestly five of our dissertation writing graduate students over the summer (see also here). The experiment paid off well. Here's what they accomplished, in their own words.

--------------

Mike Smith

This summer, with the help of funding from MEMSI, I got a good start on my research for my chapter on Mandeville and botanical vertu. I began by reading a wide variety of herbals (from Greek, Roman,
Arabic, and medieval sources), in order to get a grasp of the form, conventions, and history of the herbal tradition. Yet, however hard I tried to pin down the conventions of the herbal, I found that they aren’t so self-contained. Treatises on the “virtues” and uses of plants can be found alongside treatises on other subjects of natural history: rocks and precious stones (lapidaries), animals, weather, and astrology (for example, the Vienna Dioscurides, a 6th Century manuscript celebrated for its illustrations of the plants described in Dioscurides’ De materia medica, also contains a substantial treatise on birds). I therefore had to adjust my understanding of herbals -- as well as the moments of
botanical vertu in Mandeville’s Travels -- as a component in a larger system, or “ecology,” of other
natural phenomena. This led me to ask more interesting questions about the Travels and how it participates in not only the tradition of herbals specifically but natural history writing in general. From this research, a primary question emerged to help guide my chapter on Mandeville: What happens when we read Mandeville as a natural philosopher? How might this worldview “answer” to more constraining worldviews found in the Travels, such as Christianity? I also did some research on medieval European gardens and orchards and their place in culture. This research, along with a re-reading of “Sir Orfeo,” has led me to begin with my chapter on the grafted tree in “Sir Orfeo,” instead of beginning with a chapter on Mandeville’s Travels. This summer research helped me sort through my ideas and dissertation plans in what is typically an off-period (because students aren’t typically funded for summer). It was a great kick-start to my dissertation and I’m now in the process of drafting my first chapter.

Jessica Frazier

The summer funding granted to the MEMSI PhD students afforded me the opportunity to conduct
sustained archival research into the correspondence and/or dissonance between early modern
fashion and “English” identity—an inquiry central not only to my ongoing dissertation project
but also to upcoming conference presentations. I benefited from the examination of three distinct
archives: the literary texts housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, DC); the Tudor
and Stuart portrait exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery (London, England); and the actual
sartorial collections at the Fashion Museum (Bath, England). All of these archives respectively
and distinctly furthered and complicated my approach to the engagement between fashion thing
and fashionable subject. Through my reading of Richard Hakluyt’s The principal navigations, voyages,
traffiques and discoveries of the English nation, made by sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quartersof the earth (1598-1600) at the Folger Library, I began to develop a theorization of “trauell” that will provide the framework for much of my dissertation. Days spent at the National Portrait Gallery and the Fashion Museum not only materialized the fashion accessories that I hope to follow in my dissertation (diamonds, feathers, and lovelocks) but also brought me into contact with the past in a way that stirred questions about historicity itself. Indeed, I will present a paper at the 1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group later this fall that examines the relationship between history and objective agency within the East/West paradigm of Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. My experiences of looking and reading over the past few months have undoubtedly shaped my thinking and writing about fashion in unexpected and provocative ways. And it has underscored for me the
compelling possibilities of the kinds of interdisciplinary conversations encouraged by MEMSI—
conversations between texts, between archives, and between colleagues across specialties.

Nedda Mehdizadeh

The research grant awarded by GWMEMSI this summer gave me the opportunity to progress significantly on my dissertation project. At the beginning of the summer, I had a personal goal to research the local archives in Washington, DC and to compose a working draft of the first chapter of my project by summer’s end, leaving the month of September to revise. It is precisely because of the support given by GWMEMSI that I was able to accomplish this goal. I spent each day at the Folger Shakespeare Library, turning its wonderful work environment into my personal office and its congenial atmosphere into a space in which I could share my developing ideas with scholars from around the world. I was also able to think ahead to the Babel Working Group conference this November and the Shakespeare Association of America conference April 2011, for which the research I conducted at the Folger Shakespeare Library will be significant. I am now making the final changes to my first chapter, and looking forward to beginning my second dissertation chapter this October.

Jennifer Wood

The generous fellowship allowed me to achieve a great deal this summer – even more, perhaps, than I set out to do! Because of the funding, I was able to travel into the city, and pay parking and metro fares in order to study at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I began to research instances where western sound travels to the east. Most exciting was my reading of a document that is not easily accessible: the travel narrative of Thomas Dallam, an organ maker in Queen Elizabeth’s service who ventured to Istanbul to craft a huge clockwork organ as a gift from Elizabeth to Mehmed III. His narrative is singular because it presents a westerner’s encounter with the east and Dallam is allowed access to certain areas of close proximity to the “Grand Signoir” because his musical abilities so charmed Mehmed. I was also able to spend time this summer performing research for my data dumps (a four week process, where I write questions I’m interested in researching and thinking through as my dissertation proceeds, then answer these questions) and taking my field exams, on which I am happy to report that I earned a “high pass.” Through my data dumps, I was able to carefully consider both terms in my title “Sounding Otherness”, and began to think more broadly about what these “othernesses” might include. In addition to the otherness of Indian sound (indicating both “Indians” in the east, as well as those in the west), I began to encounter sounds of gender/sexuality, witchcraft, death, and divinity, which, like Indian sounds, are not necessarily locatable to certain places or bodies. While I have not yet consolidated these various sounds of otherness into chapter headings, I was excited to come across these sounds of otherness, in great part because of the fellowship which allowed me to focus on my research. This summer was really the first chance I have had to focus solely on my dissertation project, which I found more exciting and intriguing as the summer (and my reading) progressed. Again, I am so grateful for this fellowship which allowed me the ability to finally pursue my dissertation research and begin an academic journey through early modern sounds of otherness.

Lowell Duckert

I spent most of my early summer drafting the first chapter of my dissertation "Water Ralegh's Hydrography of Desire" at the Folger Shakespeare Library. After finishing my draft and sending it to my committee for revision, I began researching my second chapter on early modern travel narratives related to the Northwest Passage: this involved reading historical documents, contemporary theoretical works on the post-human and the philosophy of science, and also recent studies of glaciers and icy bodies. I'm interested in early modern perspectives on living ice, icescapes, and glaciers for what they may teach us about the coconstituitiveness of humans and nonhumans in the present, a process I'm (tentatively) calling ecocompositionality: like glaciers, how do we de/recompose with the physical world, create shared narratives, and process towards new futures? I wrote nearly half of the chapter during the rest of the summer. In addition, I co-organized a panel with Alf Siewers called "Nature Post-Catastophe" for the upcoming BABEL Working Group conference in Austin, TX this November. With Professor Siewer's assistance, I wrote our panel proposal and invited four panelists from across the country to take part. Without the generous amount of summer money, I would not have been able to achieve half as much!

Rereading the Tempest, AKA Temfest

2010-09-10T13:44:00.006-04:00

The GW Africana Studies Program, Latino Studies Program, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute are proud to sponsor in partnership two events that focus upon Shakespeare's The Tempest and its legacies. You can read some background here.

TemFest I

Friday October 1 at 2PM Rome Hall (801 22nd St NW) room 771
A panel of GW faculty and graduate students speaking about the play in its context, as a site for contemporary research, as a provocation to new literature, criticism, theory. This panel is especially for faculty and graduate students. Moderated by Jennifer James, and featuring:

Jonathan Gil Harris, "The Tempest and the Temporalities of Globalization"
Christopher Sten, "Leo Marx's "Shakespeare's American Fable'"
Jennifer Wood, "DisOrienting Soundscapes in The Tempest"
Robert McRuer, "Derek Jarman and Queer Tempests"
Antonio López, "Blackface Calibán and the Making of Americanists"
Holly Dugan, "Tempests: Rape in the Brave New World"

TemFest II

Friday December 3 at 3 PM 1957 E Street Room B12
A panel of scholars speaking about the afterlife of the play, sharing their own research and holding a lively public conversation. For a general audience; all are welcome. Featuring:

Anston Bosman, "Accident and Amazement in recent Tempests"

Anston Bosman is Associate Professor and Director of Studies in the English Department at Amherst College. His publications this year include a review essay in Shakespeare Quarterly on the British-South African production of The Tempest and the chapter on "Shakespeare and Globalization" in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. He is completing a book on transnational theater in the early modern Germanic world and a collaborative project on "Intertheatricality" with Gina Bloom (UC Davis) and Will West (Northwestern).

Steve Mentz, "The Void in The Tempest"

Steve Mentz is Associate Professor of English at St. John's University in New York City. His recent work on maritime literary culture includes the book At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (Continuum, 2009) and a gallery exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, "Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 - 1750." He has also written a study of Elizabethan prose fiction, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006) and co-edited a collection about early modern criminality, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Michigan, 2004). Works in progress include a study of shipwreck narratives and a co-edited collection on Thomas Nashe.

J Michael Dash, "Ariel's Isle, Caribbean Rewritings of The Tempest"

J. Michael Dash, Professor of French and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is a leading scholar in the fields of Caribbean and Francophone literatures. Dash is the author of two of the most influential works of Caribbean cultural history, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Literature and Ideology in Haiti: 1915-1961(MacMillan, 1981). He has also written many other notable works, including Haiti and the United States (MacMillan, 1997) and a study of the Martiniquan writer Edouard Glissant (Cambridge University Press, 1995). His most recent study, Culture and Customs of Haiti, appeared in 2001 (Greenwood Press).

Both events are free and welcome all who wish to attend. Please join us.

Huw Griffiths @ GW 10/1

2010-09-09T21:56:00.005-04:00

You are invited to our second fall seminar on Friday, October 1 at 9 AM. The seminar takes place in Rome Hall 771 located at 801 22nd St. NW. Breakfast will be served.

Huw Griffiths from the University of Sydney will discuss his precirculated paper "The Hands and Tongues of Sovereignty in Shakespeare's King John." The paper will be available at least a week ahead of time. Please contact Lowell Duckert [lduckert@gwu.edu] if you would like to attend.

Professor Griffiths's broad interest is sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with specific interests in constructions of the early modern nation; rhetoric, politics and the body; sovereignty; violence in Shakespeare’s history plays; Shakespeare and Wales; representations of the ruin. Other interests include eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare, contemporary British poetry and contemporary gay fiction. He has a few books forthcoming -- Shakespearean Biopolitics and A Nation in Ruins: Space, Text and History in Early Modern England -- and has published several articles and book chapters. He is also the author of Hamlet: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Palgrave 2005).

Join us on the 1st!

Roundtable on Objects, Networks and Materiality @ Kalamazoo

2010-09-08T05:30:00.004-04:00

scene from the Gundestrup cauldron

GW MEMSI is happy to announce the participants for its 2011 roundtable on "Objects, Networks and Materiality" at 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo:

Laurie Finke, "A Parliament of Things?"
Julie Orlemanski, "Things without Faces"
Valerie Allen, "Medieval Nets"
Liza Blake, "Passionate Matter"
Kellie Robertson, "Remediating Matter"
Lowell Duckert, "The Ice Age is Never Over"

We immodestly propose that this is the smartest, most radiant line-up of medievalists and early modernists ever assembled.

Gail Orgelfinger @ GW 9/10

2010-08-20T12:41:00.002-04:00

Please join us on Friday September 10 from 9-11 AM for Gail Orgelfinger, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Her paper "The Legacy of Joan of Arc to the English: 1431-1831" will be pre-circulated at least a week ahead of the meeting. Participants should come ready to discuss the work. The seminar takes place in the Academic Center of the George Washington University, 801 22nd St NW, Rome Hall 771. Breakfast will be served. Please RSVP to Lowell Duckert [lduckert@gwu.edu] if you wish to attend.

Professor Orgelfinger specializes in English and French medieval literature. Her dissertation, published by Garland Medieval Texts, was an edition of The Hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle (New York: Garland, 1988). She received an NEH grant to study "Lay Life in the Middle Ages" at Indiana University, developing an interest in chivalric narrative. She is a Founding Member of the International Joan of Arc Society.

Publications include "J.K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary" in Studies in Medievalism XVII (2009). A review of Illustrating Camelot is forthcoming in the October issue of Speculum. Other publications include "Carl Dreyer's Passion Play in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Jesus," (Film & History CD-ROM Annual, 2003), and with Robin Farabaugh, "Words of Conviction: Trial Narratives & Testimony of Anne Askew & Joan of Arc," in Margaret Mikesell, Adele F. Seeff, & Linda L. Lowery, eds., Culture & Change: Attending to Early Modern Women (Associated Universities Presses, 2003).

We'll update you soon with the calendar of events for 2010-11.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Conference Poster

2010-08-17T14:44:00.002-04:00

GW MEMSI conference: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

2010-08-17T14:39:00.011-04:00

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods

An interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute

March 11 and 12, 2011

George Washington University

Washington DC

KEYNOTE LECTURE by Jane Bennett, Professor and Chair of Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things and The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics

The conference fosters a lively conversation structured around the keynote and
five plenary sessions:

Animal Karl Steel and Sharon Kinoshita

Mineral Kellie Robertson and Valerie Allen

Vegetable Carla Nappi and Peggy McCracken

Ethics Eileen Joy and Julian Yates

Objects Julia Reinhard Lupton

We also invite paper, panel and roundtable proposals. Please send one paragraph abstracts or complete panel proposals to gwmemsi@gmail.com by October 15, 2010. To keep the proceedings intimate, conference participation is limited to eighty.

Getting Lost (At Sea)

2010-07-07T10:45:00.002-04:00

Currently on exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library is “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750.” The exhibit not only displays a veritable trove of items – instruments, maps, paintings, and pamphlets – but also shows how these items flow around and within the oceanic imaginations of Humphrey Gilbert, John Smith, Daniel Defoe, William Shakespeare, and others. There is even a hands-on section for the more adventurous landlubber. My personal favorite is the panel describing the “hydrographic uncertainty” of life at sea; the first chapter of my dissertation thinks about how Walter Ralegh writes about water (hydrography) and the more theoretical ways in which water writes (hydrographesis) his narrative, even himself. Can water’s depths ever be fully known, its borders enlimned, or its touch avoided? What is certain about water? “We are reminded that everything is flowing,” John Muir says, when we contemplate water. What might happen when we drift with these flows? To find yourself “lost at sea,” then, might be both a condition of discovery and a desirable moment of (non)human creativity.

The curator, in fact, is someone who has recently completed an intriguing book on the subject of water and early modernity: Steve Mentz, author of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (Continuum, 2009). On Tuesday, July 13th he will deliver a free lecture at the Folger: “Stories from the Sea: At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean.” You may also watch his interview on DC’s Let’s Talk Live from June 23rd.

Michel Serres describes the “visit” in nautical terms: “Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.” Inhabiting and traveling simultaneously. That being said, a visit to the Folger this summer is highly recommended.

“Lost at Sea” runs until September 4th and is free to the public.

Kalamazoo 2011: Objects, Networks, and Materiality (A Roundtable)

2010-07-07T09:04:00.001-04:00

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is sponsoring a roundtable on Objects, Networks and Materiality at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI (May 12-15, 2011).

We welcome short papers on any aspect of medieval, early modern or contemporary theories of matter, especially those that posit materiality as something other than inert: agental, networked, catalytic, vibrant. Contact Jeffrey Cohen (jjcohen@gwu.edu) with questions or proposals.

Get Lost (at Sea)

2010-07-07T06:30:00.001-04:00

If you are in DC this summer, don't miss the exhibit Lost at Sea at the Folger Shakespeare Library (free; no tickets required). This well curated collection of artifacts and illustrations emphasizes the uncertainties of watery horizons, and the possibilities they offer for creativity. Steve Mentz, author of At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean and the curator of the exhibition, will be lecturing on Stories from the Sea: At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean on Tuesday July 13. The event is free.

If you're not in DC, the digital exhibit is quite good as well. Just follow the link above. You may also be interested in this review from the Washington Post.

Chaucer’s Plants and Sir Walter Raleigh’s Soundtracks

2010-06-29T16:58:00.000-04:00

Don't miss Menachem Wecker's piece on GW MEMSI graduate student dissertation projects in GW Today.

GW MEMSI funds field-shaping summer dissertation research

2010-06-08T09:14:00.006-04:00

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is happy to announce that we have been able to fund modestly five dissertation research projects this summer. This research is being conducted by our graduate students who have already completed their coursework and are now working in the archive and composing their theses. We believe that their projects, each of which will some day become a published book, will change the shape of medieval and early modern studies. We believe, in other words, that supporting these projects supports the future of the field.

A longterm study conducted by the Mellon Foundation found that summer support is integral to the timely completion of dissertations in the humanities: an intuitive discovery, perhaps (what scholar can dedicate summer months to doctoral research when he or she must work a summer job to pay for rent and food?), but scarcity of resources makes supporting graduate students in the summer impossible at many institutions.

Access to the Library of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library (where many of our funded students will be spending their summers) and an internationally renowned faculty give GW's graduate program the potential to be the best in the United States. That's not hyperbole: the only thing we're missing is sufficient longterm funding for the excellent graduate students who enroll here.

Here are our five such students and their projects.

Nedda Mehdizadeh

I have begun the process of composing the first chapter of my dissertation entitled Translating Persia: Safavid Iran and Early Modern English Writing. The chapter to which I plan to devote my summer research centers on the travels of the historical Sherley brothers – adventurers from England who go to Persia in the early Seventeenth Century. Though the Sherleys are a popular and famous family, scholarship has yet to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography about these figures. My intention is to foreground their narrative by creating a comprehensive bibliography and providing an analysis that interrogates the ways in which they have been discussed in scholarship to date. Because these figures are so crucial to English literature and history, I believe my work is necessary and relevant to current conversations circulating within scholarship about early modern travel. I will spend my time this summer at the Library of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library, both of which contain rich archives to study travel to Persia in the early modern period.

Jennifer Wood

The working title for my dissertation is “Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Writing” and I am considering various early modern travel narratives (specifically Smith, Scott, and Jean de Lery) that describe this New World in terms of its soundscape. What is of particular interest to me is what this soundscape does to these English or European adventurers, whether they experience terror or fear, or even rapture at the sounds of “New Worlds” located both in the east and the west. The term “Indian” is a fascinating one which can apply to the native peoples of the Americas, or the inhabitants of the eastern country India, and it is notable that Columbus died believing that he had reached eastern India. This spatial confusion is recapitulated in the musics of various non-Europeans or non-English peoples; just as the Indians of the Americas are conflated with the Indians of India, European reactions to “other-worldly” music display confusion about the space of these encounters which then becomes replicated on the stage. One example of this is Shakespeare’s Tempest, which is ostensibly a New World play, yet eastern or oriental sounds continually leak into it as well. A specific song within a play that also “sounds otherness” in both the Americas and the East is Ben Jonson’s “The Triumph” which appears in The Devil is an Ass, and mentions “the wool of beaver” (a novel New World commodity) and “the nard in the fire” (nard is a root of Himalayan origin) in the same breath. Another example of “otherness” that I hope to examine in greater depth over the summer is the otherness of the afterlife that gets represented sonically. Death is the anamorphic sound in all of Feste’s songs in Twelfth Night, while there were also many contemporary pieces of music that either mention death in the lyrics or were meant to sound like devils or witches through manipulation of the voice or instruments. I am fascinated by the fact that music or sound is the chief medium to express these representations of otherness, and plan to research collections of early modern ballads. Much of my research will be at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Lowell Duckert

My dissertation maps new ways of thinking about landscape, materiality, and ecology in early modern travel literature and drama. Picking up on the theories of actor-networks and non-linear dynamics outlined by Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and Manuel De Landa, I argue that landscape is a thriving meshwork of living matter -- places of constant connectivity, interminable possibilities, and creative desires between human and nonhuman actants. By reconceiving landscape as a place of ever-burgeoning activity, I depart from traditional modes of ecocriticism that cultivate an exclusively human interface with the environment, anthropocentric readings that tend to foster more negative ideas of "catastrophe" or "prevention." I hope that in reconsidering early modern landscapes as networks of coconstituitive things -- nature-cultures, (non)humans -- I offer new ways of thinking about our own complex ecological present and future, and, most importantly, provide positive means for reveling in our shared vibrancy with the natural world. Works included are Walter's Ralegh's voyage to Guiana (living rivers); Martin Frobisher's expedition to Newfoundland (moving land/glaciers); William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (enfolding wool/Golden Fleece); and Mandeville's medieval Travels (wandering islands). I am currently completing the first chapter of my dissertation, "Hydrography of Desire: Wa(l)ter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana and the Early Modern Aquascape," highlighting the ways Ralegh desires to touch and be touched by the waters of Guiana, a powerful example of the desirable material connections -- and endless possibilities of being -- made available to us by aquascapes past and present. I am also planning an essay collection on ecomaterialism for the journal postmedieval. Much of my research will be conducted at the Folger.

Mike Smith

I'm starting my dissertation, tentatively titled "Vegetable Love: Desiring Plants in the Middle Ages." I'll be looking at human-plant encounters from the perspective of what Jane Bennett calls, in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, "vital materialism," in which inhuman matter has a "vitality," or independent agency, that runs in and alongside human bodies. From this vital-materialist perspective, I explore how medieval writers such as Chaucer, Marie de France, and Mandeville might understand human desires as "vitally" connected, in some way, to plantlife. To do so, I'll organize each of the four chapters of my dissertation around a botanical concept -- chapters on vertu, poison, grafting, and quickening -- and will look at how these concepts might offer us ways of seeing human desire as (at least partly) tethered to the same inhuman forces that animate plantlife, as well as the larger world ("network") of non-human things. Chaucer expresses this vital connection between plant and human desires in the opening lines of the General Prologue, as the he traces the human desire to "goon on pilgrimages" to the same force ("Nature") that encourages the flowers to bloom, the crops to grow, and the birds to sing and build nests. In the Middle English Breton lay Sir Ofeo, the complicated (and often hybrid) identities and desires of Sir Orfeo's "Inglish" community is figured through the most important space in the narrative, under a "ympe-tree," a grafted tree, that serves as portal to the Underworld. And in Marie de France's Lais, human and plant desires are even burred, as she weaves romances about entwined human lovers, such as Tristan and Isolde, with the the similar romance between honeysuckle and hazel tree ("Chevrefoil")... With this grant, I will be able to begin my dissertation this summer; I'll start by researching and writing my first chapter on botanical vertu in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, titled "The Vertu of Travel: Mandeville's Vegetal Approach to Difference." During this time, I'll be reading medieval pharmacological texts, which are treatises on the "vertus ("virtues") of plants and herbs -- or, in short, the efficacy that plant matter has on human (and sometimes non-human) bodies. As Mandeville often taps into this tradition of pharmacological vertu, reading the Travels from a pharmacological perspective will offer a unique approach to understanding how Mandeville might express human desire (for travel, for connection, for difference, etc.) as part of a much larger inhuman system.

Jessica Frazier

The working title of my dissertation is “Object-ionable Fashion: Material Agency, Hybridity, and Temporality in Transnational Early Modern Networks.” Drawing upon the Deleuzian assemblage and the Latourian actor network, this project investigates the way in which fashionable novelties—particularly those from the Orient and the New World—challenge the notion of the English subject as the consummate consumer and therefore the assertion of a singular national identity. In recent years, early modern studies has suggested the English proto-imperialism staged in the theater, pamphlets, and travel narratives as little more than the fantasy of Marlovian overreachers. Nevertheless, even those scholars to whom we can credit the dissipation of the myth of English supremacy continue to posit the consumption of foreign objects as a kind of proto-imperialism. In his important work Turning Turk, Daniel Vitkus writes, “Instead, the alternative path to power [for England] was through the acquisition of valuable commodities: gold, silver, and pearls taken from newly ‘discovered’ lands, luxury goods obtained through trade in Asia or the Mediterranean, or booty taken by privateers from Spanish ships in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, or elsewhere.” Such assertions, however, occlude objects’ fashionable forwardness. By following what Jane Bennett might term specific fashion “things” through the early modern archive, my project will suggest the consuming “English” subject and consumed “foreign” object as a dichotomy worth troubling. Indeed, an examination of feathers, diamonds, and hair gestures toward the stylistic possibilities of the (non)human ensemble. Each of the above objects will occupy separate chapters of my dissertation. Summer funding would enable me to pursue the whims of feathers, diamonds, and hair (and for these objects to, in turn, direct me) through the early modern archive housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library: I am particularly interested in the Folger’s extensive collection of Richard Hakluyt’s travel narratives. By the end of the summer, I hope to have identified works from a variety of genres in which feathers, diamonds, and hair present themselves. I will then be able with greater certainty to select the texts that I will explore in each dissertation chapter. As a result, I could more fully enter into early modern intellectual conversations by presenting portions of these chapters next year at the conferences for the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS) and the Shakespeare Association of American (SAA). Summer funding would grant the time needed for rigorous scholarship—a privilege that would prove an impossibility should I need to seek nonacademic employment to support myself during the summer lapse of my graduate stipend.

Please support our mission

2010-05-26T10:24:00.000-04:00

GW MEMSI brings the study of the literature, history and culture of early Europe within a global perspective to students, teachers and researchers, and an interested public.

Our outreach extends from the high school students who enroll in a "Myths of Britain" course through DC's School Without Walls to the scholars from around the US and the world who travel to Washington to participate in our symposia and lecture series. Because we aim to train the next generation of humanities researchers, we are diligent in cultivating our undergraduates as well as those graduate students who will undertake advanced work.

Every event we sponsor is free and open to all who wish to attend. Given the current economic landscape, we are always seeking financial support for our initiatives and for our students. If you can help, please contact the Director (jjcohen@gwu.edu) directly. You may also contribute via a check made out to the George Washington University with "GW MEMSI" in the memo line mailed to the George Washington University, 2100 M Street, NW, Suite 310 Washington, D.C. 20052.

You may also donate online, but please ensure that you designate your gift for the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute.

We thank you for your support. We couldn't accomplish anything without YOU.

3 Things

2010-05-05T10:13:00.002-04:00

1. Thank you so much for making this year such a successful one for GW MEMSI.

2. Please save the dates! GW MEMSI will sponsor its first conference on March 10-12, 2011. The theme is "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods." Conference to be held at the GW campus in Washington, DC. Check this blog for updates.

3. The entire contents of the new journal postmedieval are free during the month of May. You can download all or part of the inaugural issue here.

New Worlds: Cross Cultural Exchange East and West (UMD April 17)

2010-04-12T07:57:00.000-04:00

Important "Intersections" Update 4/9

2010-04-07T17:34:00.005-04:00

Due to an unforeseen circumstance, Henry Turner will not be able to join us on Friday 4/9 for the "Intersections" symposium.

We are excited that Bryan Reynolds (Professor of Drama, UC Irvine) will still be presenting his paper titled "Objective Agency." In addition, he has provided me with two *supplemental* readings from his book Transversal Subjects: the "Glossary of Transversal Terms" and Gary Genosko's afterword, "Subjects Matter." Please email me [lduckert@gwu.edu] and I will gladly pass them along.

The event will be held at 4 PM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd Street NW). No RSVP is needed; the event is open to everyone. More information about Bryan Reynolds is posted on our earlier announcement.

Hope to see you there!

Bryan Reynolds and Henry Turner @ GW 4/9

2010-03-29T17:28:00.012-04:00

We are thrilled to announce that GW will host Bryan Reynolds (Professor of Drama, UC Irvine) and Henry Turner (Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University) for a special symposium titled "Intersections" on Friday, April 9th. "Intersections" investigates the ways in which subjects and objects come into contact with one another in the early modern period -- whether through material consumption, travel and its translations, the post/human, or the transversal. In doing so, the symposium also explores the intersections of the subject-object with various approaches to phenomenology -- from Deleuze, Latour, Marx, and others. Reynolds will present his paper titled "Objective Agency." Turner's paper is titled "Toward a Materialist Theory of Translation: Richard Hakluyt." The event will be held at 4 PM in Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd Street NW). No RSVP is needed; the event is open to everyone. Please join us!

Some biographical notes about our presenters:

Bryan Reynolds's research encompasses critical theory, history, performance studies, social semiotics, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and dramatic literature, especially of the English Renaissance. It focuses on the experience, articulation, and performance of consciousness, subjectivity, and sociocultural formations, particularly the ideologies, passions, and geographies that define them, both on and off the stage. As a playwright and director, Reynolds is also cofounder of the Transversal Theater Company. Forthcoming books include: Variations on Deleuze; editor, Performance Concepts; and co-editor with Paul Cefalu, Tarrying with the Subjunctive: The Return to Theory in Early Modern English Studies (2010). More information can be found at his departmental website and at his personal, technicolor page. A short selection of his works:

Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, Co-Editor, with William West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Several of his plays -- Unbuckled; Woof, Daddy; Railroad; Blue Shade; Lumping in Fargo; and Eve's Rapture -- have been produced in the United States and Europe.

Henry Turner's primary research area is in Renaissance Drama, especially comedy, and twentieth-century critical theory, especially Marxism, Foucault, Derrida, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. Other research areas include early modern intellectual history, especially literary theory and early scientific thought; economic and industrial history; urban history; the history of the theater; print culture; the history of sexuality and the family; and related areas in medieval literary, social, and intellectual life. He is Director of the Program of Early Modern Studies at Rutgers and a member of the Executive Committee at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. He is currently at work on several projects: The Corporate Commonwealth, a book-length study of the concept of the "corporation," including early modern philosophies of industry, technology, and economy and their relationship to notions of political community and political subjectivity; assorted essays on Richard Hakluyt as a translator and humanist and on 16th century humanism and economic thought; a brief essay on "Action in the Form of Tools and Machines," forthcoming in the new journal postmedieval; an essay on recent discussions of "form" in literary criticism and its relevance for historians of science, as part of a forthcoming forum in the journal Isis. More information can be found at his departmental and personal websites. A selected bibliography:

Shakespeare's Double Helix ("Shakespeare Now!" series; Continuum Press, 2008)
The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: and London: Routledge, 2002)

“Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare.” South Central Review 26.1&2 (Winter & Spring, 2009): 197-217
“From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589)." Written collaboratively with Bryan Reynolds for Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer, ed. Edward Gieskes and Kirk Melnikoff (Ashgate Press, 2008), 73-93
“Literature and Mapping in England, 1520-1688.” In The History of Cartography, Vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part I, ed. David Woodward (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 412-426
“The Problem of the More than One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Quarterly 57.4 (Winter, 2006): 413-442

Marissa Greenberg @ GW 3/26

2010-03-09T09:59:00.009-05:00

Marissa Greenberg will be the Institute's guest on Friday March 26 for two exciting events:

1. A lunch seminar to discuss her paper "Pulling Down the Pillars: Staging Tragedy in Samson Agonistes." 12-2 PM in Rome Hall 771. The paper will be precirculated two weeks ahead of time. RSVP me (lduckert@gwu.edu) if you plan to attend. Lunch will be served.

2. A Gateway Lecture on "Writing About Space." 4 PM in Rome 771. No RSVP necessary.

Marissa Greenberg is an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches Shakespeare, Milton, and early English literature and drama. Her publications include “The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and The Roman Actor,” in Renaissance Drama (forthcoming); “Women and the Theatre in Thomas Heywood’s London,” in The Idea of the City: Early-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern Locations and Communities, edited by Joan Fitzpatrick (2009); “Signs of the Crimes: Topography, Murder, and Early Modern Domestic Tragedy,” in Genre (2007); and “Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Processions and Generic Conventions in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, edited by Stephen Cohen (2007). Professor Greenberg recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Research Award. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Metropolitan Tragedy, 1567-1667, in which she examines early modern English tragic theory and practice as a response to urban change.

March 5 @ 2 PM: "Race?"

2010-02-23T14:43:00.001-05:00

The George Washington University

Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute

invites you to our spring symposium

“Race?”

Race is a term fraught with contradiction and incoherence. Is race skin color? Physiology? Susceptibility to certain diseases? Geographic origin? Genetic variation? The impress of climate on body? Born or made? A bodily, ethical, legal, cultural or moral state? An inheritance? A performance?

Scientifically speaking, race does not exist … and yet race endures.

Please join us for a GW MEMSI symposium examining the long history of race. Our guest speakers will map the changes in how race has been understood, as well as its surprising constants, from the medieval period to the modern. Short presentations will be followed by a lively conversation.

Jennifer James (English and Africana Studies, GW). Jennifer is the author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African-American Literature of War, the Civil War-World War II and has published essays in the African American Review and other venues. Her next book explores black Catholicism and post-Reformation sectarianism in the early Americas.
Thomas Guglielmo (American Studies, GW). Tom received his PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 2000. His book White on Arrival won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. He is presently at work on a second book tentatively entitled Race War: World War II and the Crisis of American Democracy.
Andrew Zimmerman (History, GW). Andrew is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South.
Antonio López (English, GW). Tony teaches Latino Studies and critical theory. His work has appeared in Latino Studies and the The Afro-Latin Reader. He is writing a book on the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America.
Ayanna Thompson (English, Arizona State University). Ayanna is the author of Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. She edited Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance.

The symposium takes place on Friday March 5 in the GW Marvin Center 3^rd floor Amphitheatre from 2-4 PM.

The event is free and welcomes all who would like to attend.

Because our motto is Ad Astra Per Elephantos ...

2010-02-18T19:41:00.000-05:00

... we feel compelled to offer you this picture of the amazing Al-Jazari Elephant Clock. Can you spot the "wooden robots in traditional Arabian attire"?

Friday's Events will be held as scheduled

2010-02-12T05:15:00.000-05:00

Both the Orienting Europe seminar and the Michelle Warren Gateway Lecture on "The Postcolonial Past" will take place today (Friday February 12). The GW campus is open as usual.

Seminar at 1 PM in Rome 771; lecture at 4 PM in Marvin Center Elliot Room 310. Click on the links above for details.

GW MEMSI welcomes new affiliated faculty

2010-02-10T15:34:00.000-05:00

The GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute is warmly welcomes the following GW faculty to formal affiliation:

Ingrid Creppell (Political Science)
Paul Duff (Religion)
Phillip Jacks (Art History)
Jaime Marroquin (Spanish)
Barbara von Barghahn (Art History)
Dewey Wallace (Religion)

Michelle Warren "The Postcolonial Past" 2/12

2010-02-03T20:33:00.006-05:00

Michelle Warren will give our second Gateway Lecture of the spring semester, "The Postcolonial Past," on Friday February 12th at 4 PM in Marvin Center Elliott Room 310 (800 21st St. NW). As Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Warren specializes in French and British medieval studies, romance philology, Arthurian studies, translation, and postcolonial theory. She is also a member of Dartmouth's Medieval and Renaissance Studies. A brief glimpse at her work:

“Medievalism and the Making of Nations.” Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Ed. Nadia Altschul and Kathleen Davis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 286-98.
Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, co-editor with Patricia Clare Ingham. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Her current projects include Creole Medievalism (the role of colonialism in the formation of French medieval studies, focused on the Réunionnais writer Joseph Bédier); Making Furs, Making Romance (literary culture in early fifteenth-century London, centered on the translation of French romances sponsored by the Skinners' Guild); and Courting Empire (regional poetics in the works of Chrétien de Troyes). More information about her scholarship and research interests may be found at her Dartmouth website.

In preparation for "The Postcolonial Past," two articles are available here for download: "The Noise of Roland" (Exemplaria 16.2 2004) and “Au commencement était l'île: The Colonial Formation of Joseph Bédier’s Chanson de Roland.” Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Ed. Ananya J. Kabir and Deanne M. Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 205-26.

Orienting Europe: A MEMSI Seminar

2010-02-03T08:37:00.000-05:00

Please join us on Friday February 12 from 1-3 PM for our seminar on "Orienting Europe."

Our presenters:

Ashley Denham Busse, "Veiled Fantasies and the Fantasy of the Veil in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters."
Jessica Frazier, "French Fashion on the Turkish Carpet: Philip Massinger’s Glitterati"
Jennifer Wood, "Musical Dis-Orientations in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil"
Response: Michelle Warren, Dartmouth College

The seminar takes place in Rome 771 (Academic Center, 801 22nd St NW).

Also join us at 4 PM for Michelle Warren's Gateway Lecture, "The Postcolonial Past" (Marvin Center Elliott Room 310, 800 21st Street, NW).

[image: Fra Mauro's world map, from here]

Gateway Lectures for Spring 2010

2010-01-28T13:42:00.000-05:00

The Gateway Lectures introduce their audience to an important field or topic within medieval and early modern studies. The lectures are designed to be a substantial contribution to research and intellectual community -- while remaining engaging to a general audience. They are delivered by renowned scholars who attempt to make their work accessible and inspirational. All Gateway lectures are free and welcome all who wish to attend.

January 29: Alf Siewers (Bucknell University), "Ecocriticism." Marvin Center Amphitheatre, 800 21st Street, NW, 4 PM.
February 12: Michelle Warren (Dartmouth College), "The Postcolonial Past." Marvin Center Elliott Room 310, 800 21st Street, NW, 4 PM.
March 26: Marissa Greenberg (University of New Mexico), "Writing and Space." Rome Hall (Academic Center) 771, 4 PM.

Also of interest: GW MEMSI will sponsor a symposium entitled "Race?" on Friday, March 5 at 2 PM. The event will feature Ayanna Thompson (Arizona State University), whose work on Shakespeare, early modern culture, and race is widely acclaimed. She will be joined by a panel of GW faculty: Jennifer James, Antonio Lopez, Thomas Guglielmo, Andrew Zimmerman. Marvin Center Amphitheatre, 800 21st Street, NW.

New Worlds Conference CFP: Deadline Extended

2010-01-21T11:23:00.000-05:00

New Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange East and West

A Graduate Conference in Medieval and Renaissance Studies

April 17, 2010

University of Maryland, College Park

Keynote speaker: Bruce Holsinger, Professor of English and Music, University of Virginia

The Department of English at the University of Maryland and the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University invite graduate students from across the humanities to submit presentation abstracts for "New Worlds," a one-day conference to be held on April 17, 2010. More information here.

Abstracts of 400-500 words for 20-minute papers related to the conference theme should be emailed to gradconf.umd@gmail.com
no later than January 30, 2010. Accepted abstracts will be posted on the conference website, http://medrencopia.blogspot.com

Alf Siewers "Ecocriticism" 1/29

2010-01-17T15:31:00.012-05:00

Alf Siewers will deliver our first Gateway Lecture of the new year, "Ecocriticism," on Friday January 29th at 4 PM in the GW Marvin Center Amphitheatre (3rd Floor; 800 21st St. NW). Professor Siewers is Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University and coordinator of the Nature and Human Communities Initiative at the Bucknell Environmental Center. He specializes in British archipelagic studies, ecocritical approaches to early literatures, and postmodern approaches to premodern views of nature. He is also co-editor of the collection Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages and of articles in Celtic and medieval journals and book collections. His newest forthcoming articles include two on the philosophy of John Scottus Eriguena in relation to the early Irish Otherworld. Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscapes (2009) was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan. Selections from Strange Beauty may be accessed here.

Publications include:

"Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building," reprinted inThe Postmodern Beowulf , ed. Joy and Ramsey, 2006. On landscape and empire. (Originally in Viator34 (2003):1-39.)
Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, New Middle Ages series, 2005, edited with Jane Chance; also includes his "Tolkien's Cosmic-Christian Ecology" article on fantasy and landscape.
"Writing an Icon of the Land: The Mabinogi as a Mystagogy of Landscape." Peritia 19 (2005): 193-228 (Irish Medieval Academy). Iconography and layered textual landscape.
"The bluest-greyest-greenest eye: colours of martyrdom and colours of the winds as iconographic landscape." Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies50 (2005): 31-66. Landscape as a praxis of aescetic-aesthetics.
"Gildas and Glastonbury," in Via Crucis, Essays on Sources and Ideas in Memory of J.E. Cross, ed. Hall (2002). Landscape as mythic history.

More information about Professor Siewers may be found at his personal website and at Bucknell University.

Spring 2010 Calendar

2009-12-15T12:15:00.010-05:00

Please mark your calendars for these upcoming events. Times, places and further details will be posted as the events near.

Spring 201
Gateway Lecture Series
Delivered by a renowned scholar in the field, these lectures introduce and embody an emergent, important critical field or subdiscipline within medieval and early modern studies. We have three lecture scheduled for spring:

Jan. 29, 4 PM: Alf Siewers (Bucknell University), "Ecocriticism" (Marvin Center Amphitheatre, 800 21st Street, NW, 4 PM)
February 12, 4 PM: Michelle Warren (Dartmouth), "The Postcolonial Past" (Marvin Center Elliott Room 310, 800 21st Street, NW, 4 PM)
March 26, 4 PM: Marissa Greenberg (University of New Mexico), "Writing and Space"

Symposia

February 12, 1-3 PM: "Orienting Early Europe" (coincides with Michelle Warren's visit). Rome Hall 771.
March 5, 2 PM: "Race?" Features Ayanna Thompson and a panel of GW faculty: Jennifer James, Antonio Lopez, Thomas Guglielmo, Andrew Zimmerman. Marvin Center Amphitheatre.

Lunch Seminar

March 26, 12 PM: Marissa Greenberg, "Pulling Down the Pillars: Staging Tragedy in Samson Agonistes." Rome Hall 771.

Conference

April 17: New Worlds at UMD

Call for Papers: New Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange East and West

2009-12-01T14:45:00.002-05:00

Announcing the CFP for "New Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange East and West," a Graduate Conference in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, April 17, 2010 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Keynote speaker: Bruce Holsinger, Professor of English and Music, University of Virginia

The Department of English at the University of Maryland and the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University invite graduate students from across the humanities to submit presentation abstracts for "New Worlds," a one-day conference to be held on April 17, 2010.

The "New Worlds" conference will examine various European responses to encounters with people, culture, and lands to the east and the west, as reflected in medieval and early modern literature, art, and music. "New Worlds" aims to elucidate the shifts that these new interactions precipitated in various European philosophies, epistemologies, and perceptions. We intend this theme to be defined broadly, to open up intellectual possibilities, and to offer a broad geographic and cultural scope in keeping with, and advancing, current and emergent scholarly conversations.

Participants might consider a range of approaches to the conference's topic of cross-cultural exchange, including:

-- What kinds of "New Worlds" were medieval and early modern people encountering?
-- How did "New World" encounters shape literature, culture, politics, religions, philosophy, and science, and how did cultural and geographic newness figure as a force for change in European cultures and states?
-- In what unique ways did Mediterranean and Eastern European countries, which represented cultural crossing-points between West and East, respond to European encounters with American New Worlds? How did these responses differ from the arguably more isolated position of England? Or, alternatively, did they differ?
-- How might a broader understanding of "New Worlds" complicate the bifurcated focus on East/West relations in past scholarship of the medieval and early modern periods?
-- What roles do empire, colonization, and nationhood play in "New World" encounters?

Abstracts of 400-500 words for 20-minute papers related to the conference theme should be emailed to gradconf.umd@gmail.com
no later than January 15, 2010. Accepted abstracts will be posted on the conference website, http://medrencopia.blogspot.com

Book Launch Celebration: Leah Chang, Into Print

2009-12-01T10:59:00.002-05:00

Please join us for the final MEMSI event of 2009, when we will celebrate the publication of Leah Chang's new book Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France. The festivities take place on Thursday December 10 at 2 PM in the English Department seminar room (Rome Hall 771, Academic Center, 801 22nd ST NW, Foggy Bottom Metro).

Prof. Chang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1997, 2002). Her interests include pre-modern women's writing, early modern narrative and poetry, the history of the book, and the intersection of politics, performance, and sexuality in early modern French texts and culture. She has recently completed a book manuscript on book production and the concept of female authorship in early modern France, and is beginning a new project on the political function of the royal mistress in France. She will be introduced by and Prof. Masha Belenky and Prof. Holly Dugan. A wine and cheese reception will follow.

Dan Vitkus: Breakfast Seminar 12/4

2009-11-25T11:38:00.000-05:00

We will be a little late sending out the email notice and request for RSVPs, but we'd like to offer you the paper by Dan Vitkus that will be discussed on Friday December 4 now. Here it is.

We meet from 9-11 in Rome Hall 771 (Academic Center, GWU, 801 22nd St NW). Look for an email from Lowell Duckert early next week.

Happy thanksgiving!

Claustrophilia VIII: Cary Howie

2009-11-20T14:09:00.002-05:00

These words will not reproduce what I said in the long, narrow conference room at George Washington University last week, as friends and strangers and one stuffed elephant looked on. But take it—I tell myself, I tell you—as an occasion for putting some distance between authorial intention and the object, the text, so eloquently enchanted by others (beside and around me) in that space.

I wrote Claustrophilia as an account of a specific set of medieval and modern tropes (within and around enclosed space) but also as an exercise in critical poetics. The book began as a dissertation, but it was never my intention to write a dissertation, at least not in the sense in which I hear—from colleagues, from students—the conventions of dissertation writing enumerated with astonishing certainty. I wanted—and if wanting is not at the heart of this book, then tell me what is—to evoke enclosure, not prove that I had read all of the secondary literature about it. I had nothing to prove.

What I could not know, much less prove, was that the book would end up being taken in hand by a remarkably charitable community of readers and thinkers and lovers, not least among them the folks who spoke, last Friday, before sunset, in that narrow room. I could not know that Patrick O’Malley would speak of the “alchemy of metonymy” by which books and persons become transformed. I could not know that Karl Steel would speak of the doubleness of locking: up and onto, confining and adhering. I could not know that Michael Snediker would observe—would affirm—that the literal “teems with figuration”; or that Eileen Joy would show how, in a short story of Calvino’s, “generosity engenders space”; or that Madhavi Menon would translate claustrophilia beautifully, and again metonymically, into a clusterfuck. I could not know that Jeffrey Masten would bring the materiality of connectedness—“but / and,” the hinge between opposition and its non-opposite, in terms of what he calls “the difficult erotics” of the book—suddenly to the surface.

There was so much I could not know. I had never even been to Washington.

Claustrophilia was always caught—like a zipper, like a fly—between the specificity of its central figure—enclosure—and the worlds onto which that figure opened. Tell a story about claustrophilia (admit that you once liked, or still like, hiding behind couches) and you’re bound to hear other stories (many of them, curiously, about elevators). You will be reminded, repeatedly, that an enclosed space can disclose a series of spaces; that limits and the limitless need not be thought in strict opposition.

If this book has done and may be allowed to do anything, I hope that it makes room for something, for someone; that it shows how there is always more room than there might seem to be—for various forms and figures of speech, for various kinds and kindnesses of bodies—and how this abiding roominess may be enhanced precisely by paying attention to what might “seem to be”: our surfaces, our semblances, shot through with our depths.

Elevators and closets are not the only enclosures. Nets are enclosures, too. Linda Gregg writes: “there are fish in the net, / lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.”¹ This miracle—something we thought was empty is now suddenly full—does not announce itself grandly. “There are fish,” the poem says. It is ordinary; fish are ordinary. But it is also miraculous. There are fish, yes, and “lots of fish,” and lots of fish “this time,” this time which is not every time, although—why not?—it could be. Something closes; something catches. And suddenly—or slowly, since fishing is not necessarily fast—there are unexpected, ordinary, temporary things, things that bulge and ripple like a heart. The net closes abundantly. It makes room.

(1) Linda Gregg, “Fishing in the Keep of Silence,” All of It Singing (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2008), p. 111.