Spring 2011 Events:

The University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center Colloquium
Thursday, February 2nd, 12:30-2:00 at the University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning, Room 602.

James Knapp (Pitt, English) and Peggy Knapp (CMU, English) "Aesthetics of Time: the Case of the Middle English Sir Orfeo," with responses from Ryan McDermott (Pitt, English) and Daniel Selcer (Duquesne, Philosophy).     

**********

Jonathan Scott (University of Auckland, History) "Maritime Orientalism, or, The Political Theory of Water." Wednesday, February 8th at 3:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, History Department Lounge, 3703 Posvar Hall.

This talk revisits the concept of orientalism in a long chronological context, including 4th Century BC Athens, Elizabethan and Caroline England, Enlightenment Europe, and colonial and contemporary New Zealand. It seeks to identify a specifically geographic component of this construct, which historians have neglected.

Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland. Among many other books and articles, he is the author of When The Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2011), Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), and England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000).

**********

Dennis Looney (Pitt, French & Italian) "Reading Herodotus in Renaissance Ferrara." Thursday, February 9th at 5:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, the Cathedral of Learning, Room 501G, with reception to follow.

Dennis Looney is a professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, with secondary appointments in Classics and Philosophy.  Publications include: Compromising the Classics (1996); Phaethon's Children: The Este Court and Its Culture (2005); 'My Muse will have a story to paint':  Selected Prose of Ludovico Ariosto (2010); and Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (2011). In his current project he considers the recovery and reception of ancient history and its representation in early modern thinking in Europe, examining the relation between history and literature, fact and fiction, storia and fabula.   

**********

Sarah Alison Miller (Duquesne, Classics) "The Miraculous Breasts of Christina the Astonishing" Friday, February 17th at 3:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, Humanities Center, Cathedral of Learning, Room 602.

Sarah Alison Miller joined the Classics department at Duquesne University in 2008. Professor Miller received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008). Her book, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (Routledge 2010), argues that the female anatomy and its physiological processes were marked as "monstrous" in medieval medical, erotic, and religious literature.

**********

Jeremy Dauber (Columbia University, Germanic Languages and Literatures) Wednesday March 28th at 12:00 pm. Location and title TBA.

Jeremy Dauber is Atran Associate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He specializes in Yiddish literature. His first book, Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, was published in 2004 by Stanford University Press. In 2006 he and Joel Berkowitz will publish an anthology of their translations of landmark Yiddish plays. He is the coeditor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literature, a leading journal in the field. Professor Dauber's research interests include older Yiddish literature, Yiddish and Hebrew literature of the Jewish Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and Yiddish theater.

This talk is sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

**********

Su Fang Ng (University of Oklahoma, English)

Lecture: Thursday, March 29th at 4:30 pm at Carnegie Mellon University at the Giant Eagle Auditorium, Baker Hall A51. Title TBA.

Seminar: Friday, March 30th at 12:30 pm in the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning, Room 602. Title TBA.

Su Fang Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in early modern literature with a secondary interest in postcolonial literatures. She teaches courses in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, early modern travel literature, early modern women writers, Shakespeare, Milton, and postcolonial literature.  Her book, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), examines how the putatively conservative analogy between state and family was used for radical political ends. She has published essays on eastern and western versions of Alexander the Great, Aemilia Lanyer and early Stuart court patronage, the late medieval Bible translations of the Wycliffites and Tyndale, Quaker women, and postcolonial African and Southeast Asian nationalisms in Comparative Literature, ELH, Studies in Philology, The Seventeenth Century, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and an edited collection on postcolonial women writers. 

Bringing together interests in early modern England and in colonialism/postcolonialism, her second book project, Global Renaissance: Early Modern Classicism and Empire from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago, explores how Greek and Roman models of empire became part of native histories of the early modern maritime kingdoms of England and in Southeast Asia.   

This talk is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies through the Carnegie Mellon University English department and co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.   

**********

Rick Scorza (Resident Research Scholar at the Morgan Library, New York) "Popes, Pirates, Espionage and Galley Slaves:  Vasari's Lepanto Frescoes in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace." Thursday, April 5th at the University of Pittsburgh, Frick Fine Arts, Room 202.

Dr. Scorza took his M Phil from the Warburg Institute in the Survival of the Classical Tradition and then completed a PhD in Art History at the Warburg. He has published significant articles on a variety of topics in The Burlington Magazine, the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and elsewhere. He has also contributed to exhibition catalogues, most recently for the Giorgio Vasari exhibition in Arezzo celebrating the 500th anniversary of Vasari's birth. He has given papers in several international conferences, including one titled "The Iconography of Slavery."

This talk is sponsored by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Humanities Center, the History Department, and the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh.

**********

Estelle Lingo (University of Washington, Art History) "Francesco Mochi and the Edge of Tradition." Friday, April 13th at 4:00 pm at the University of Pittsburgh, Frick Fine Arts, Room 202.

Estelle Lingo is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Washington. She specializes in early modern European art, especially sculpture. Her first book, François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal (Yale, 2007), examined seventeenth-century Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy and his pursuit in Rome of a modern artistic practice in "the Greek manner." The study reconstructs the understanding of Greek art from 1550 to 1650 and the contributions of Duquesnoy's circle to the coalescence of the Greek ideal within European culture. This seventeenth-century vision of Greek art is shown to have formed the basis of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's early understanding of the formal perfections of Greek sculpture, overturning the longstanding assumption that no meaningful distinction between ancient Greek and Roman art was made prior to Winckelmann's work. Her current book project focuses on the Tuscan sculptor Francesco Mochi (1580-1654); the study takes Mochi's sculptures as the entry point for an inquiry into the historical and cultural forces reshaping sculpture at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Other research interests include Caravaggio, Gian Paolo Panini's Gallery Views, and the Italian perspective on the Grand Tour.   

This talk is sponsored by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.  

**********

The Middle Ages and the Holocaust: Medieval Anti-Judaism in the Crucible of Modern Thought
A One-Day Conferenct at the University of Pittsburgh
Sunday, April 22nd

From medieval pogroms to modern racial science, Jewish history in Europe has come to stand as a test case for thinking about problems of historical continuity and change, embodied most clearly in the tension between narratives emphasizing a timeless antisemitism and arguments for the distinctive mentalities associated with discrete historical periods. Our colloquium, "The Holocaust and the Middle Ages," seeks to reexamine Jewish history as a multi-layered problem of narrative and conceptualization, in which deeply interested anti-Jewish narratives from the premodern world form points of explosive contact with modern literary and historical modes of analysis. Part of our work is to examine how later historical lenses, such as the interests of post-Reformation history and the consuming project of Holocaust history, have substantially dictated the terms of modern understanding of Jewish-Christian relations, often with distorting effects. At the same time, medieval paradigms of religious conflict continue to operate as the unacknowledged foundations for contemporary efforts to think about problems of political conflict rooted in religious difference.   

Our objective is to bring together a small group of scholars and encourage significant interdisciplinary dialogue between medievalists and specialists in later fields, including particularly Reformation history and Holocaust studies. In doing so, we hope to move beyond generalities about the evolution of Western patterns of religious conflict to gain critical purchase on the ways in which our narratives for thinking about these problems are deeply imbricated in the assumptions, needs, and theories at work within discrete moments of historical thought.