Recent Spring 2010 Events:

Jean Givens (University of Connecticut) "Picturing the Healing Arts: Illustrating a Medieval Book of Remedies." Thursday, January 28 at 4:30 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, 202 Frick Fine Arts.

Jean Givens is Professor of Art History. Her research centers on medieval England and France, the history of history of visual and verbal literacy, and design initiatives in twentieth-century Denmark and Sweden. Her books include Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge University Press, 2005)--awarded the Medieval Academy of America's John Nicholas Brown Prize for 2009-and Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1220-1550 (Ashgate, 2006) co-edited with historians of science, Karen Reeds and Alain Touwaide. A new book on medieval and early modern scientific illustration, Reading Beyond the Text: Image, Word, and the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, is nearing completion. Her current project, Marketing Modernism: Sweden, Denmark, and the Good Life, addresses a formative alliance between design theoreticians and Nordic policy makers between 1920 and 1960.

Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program.

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Ayanna Thompson (Arizona State) Thursday and Friday, February 25 & 26 at the University of Pittsburgh.

Thursday, Feb. 25, 4:30 pm
Public Lecture: "Othello in the 21st Century"
Location: G8 Cathedral of Learning, on the ground floor.

Friday, Feb. 26, 11:00 am
Faculty/Grad seminar: "Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America"
Cathedral of Learning 512

"Othello in the 21st Century": Is it possible for Shakesepare's Othello to say something of contemporary relevance to a twenty-first-century audience? Or must the play exist as a museum piece of a bygone history and culture, and of bygone cultural constructions? This talk will explore the roles that Othello should play in our twenty-first-century American world. One example will be Peter Sellars's 2009 production of Othello, which destabilized traditional narratives about Shakespeare, race, and performance.

Ayanna Thompson is Associate Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Women and Gender Studies and Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University. She specializes in Renaissance drama and focuses on early depictions of race. She is the author of two books: Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (forthcoming from Oxford), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She is the editor of two books: Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), co-edited with Scott Newstok, and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006).

This talk is generously co-sponsored by Dean Juan Manfredi of the School of Arts and Sciences and by the Department of English at Pitt.

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Andras Kisery (CCNY) "The Politics of Hamlet: Histories of Reading." Monday, March 15 at 4:30 pm at Carnegie Mellon in A18A Porter Hall.

In recent scholarship, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has once again become a political play. But early modern audiences were also reading versions of Hamlet’s story as narratives about sovereignty, legitimacy and political advancement. In this paper, I approach the politics of the play through its Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean readings and revisions, and highlight some of the shifts they register in the understanding of the realm of politics.

Sponsored by The Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) "Censorship and the Secularization of Jewish Discourse."  Friday, March 19 at 2:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning 501.

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin is Senior Lecturer in History at Ben-Gurion University. Raz-Krakotzkin has written and lectured widely on various topics of Jewish history: the history of Zionism; the Holocaust; issues of nationalism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His most recent book, The Censor, the Editor and the Text (Penn, 2007), examines the impact of Catholic censorship on the publication and dissemination of Hebrew literature in the early modern period. He is currently a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Please join us for refreshments after the talk!  Questions? Please contact Professor Jennifer Waldron (jwaldron@pitt.edu).

Sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, the Program in Jewish Studies, and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Dan Brayton (Middlebury College) "Shakespeare and the Sea: Why Blue Ecocriticism Matters." Wednesday, March 24 at 4:30 pm at Chatham University in the Welker Room in the Laughlin Music Center.

Dan Brayton is Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College, where he also teaches in the Environmental Studies Program. He earned his doctorate at Cornell in 2001 and has published in English Literary History, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Scribners’ British Writers series, and WoodenBoat. His has held visiting appointments at Sea Education Association as well as the Williams-Mystic Program in Maritime Studies and has worked aboard sailing ships in the Atlantic, Pacific, and the Caribbean. He is co-editor of a forthcoming volume of early modern eco-criticism (Eco-critical Shakespeare), is the Literature, Art, and Music section editor of a new journal, Coriolis: the Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studies and working on a monograph called Shakespeare and the Global Ocean: Towards a Blue Ecocriticism.

Co-sponsored by The Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University.  Free and open to the public.

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Gonzalo Lamana (Pitt) "Truth, Self-Evidence, and the Colonial Question (ca. 1500)." Friday, April 16 at 3:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning 501.

Gonzalo Lamana's research and teaching explore themes of colonialism and subalternity, cultural contact, meaning-making, and historical change. He is the author of several articles and a recent book, Domination without Dominance: Inca-Spanish encounters in Early Colonial Peru (Duke, 2008). Lamana is currently working on two new research projects at the juncture of de-colonial attempts. The first examines colonial acts of reality-making through the lens of magic, while the second examines the emergence of a colonial grammar of difference in the second half of the sixteenth century in the Andes.