Events

Roundtable and Reception
Friday, December 9th, 4:30-6:30
College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI)
1211 East Atwater Avenue (Corner of Ballantine and Atwater)

Mark your calendars for the last 2011 event of Renaissance Studies, the multi-disciplinary program for faculty and graduate students working on materials from the 14th to the 17th century. The program will begin at 4:30 with a roundtable followed by a reception.

The roundtable will explore issues of general interest to scholars of Renaissance and early modern studies, with short presentations by four doctoral students. Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger (English and Religious Studies) will look at how the genre of mystical vision shares a number of formal features with the more literary genre of dream vision, and how a comparison of these two genres might help us continue to examine the complex relationship between language and experience in mystical texts. Peter Zervos (English) will focus on the Homeric hymn to Hermes as a lyric paradigm. He will use Plato’s concept of “plausibility” as a mode of the “between”, and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the paradigm in order to discuss how the hymn to Hermes, as the narrative of origin of lyric poetry, introduces a new mode of lyric that vacillates between truth and falsity, oath and blasphemy, epideixis and persuasion, aesthesis and ethos, by placing aesthetic pleasure and persuasion in a simultaneously reciprocal relation. Louise Arizzoli (History of the Art) will consider a group of allegorical representations of America produced in the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century and show how the interrelation of image and text participates to the creation of an original but polemical image of the New World. Finally, Tawrin Baker (History and Philosophy of Science) will discuss the intersection of anatomy and natural philosophy on questions of color and vision in late sixteenth-century Padua.

We will also welcome new faculty and graduate students, advertise the Renaissance Studies minor and certificate, announce the speakers for the new year-long lecture series titled “Techne: Intersections of Theory and Practice in Renaissance Culture,” as well as other events. This will be a chance for faculty and graduate students alike to meet colleagues working in other disciplines.

I hope to see you there!
Massimo Scalabrini
Director of Renaissance Studies