HFA Days: Faculty Lightning Talks
Content
Location: Lecture Hall 170, Olver Design Building, 551 North Pleasant Street
Welcome and introduction
Speaker: Dean Davidson
Time: 11–11:10 a.m.
"The Sappho Epigraph in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée"
Speaker: Melissa Mueller
Time: 11:10–11:20 a.m.
Cha’s Dictée (1982) presents as its epigraph a fragment by the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Although ascribed to Sappho, this epigraph is Cha’s own creation, and it programmatically situates her poetics as outside the normative practices of translation and citation. I consider Cha’s Sappho epigraph from two angles: First, I suggest that in presenting her forgery as authentic Sappho, Cha follows a tradition of imitators from classical antiquity who composed epigrams in the style of Sappho; a few of these are even included in Mary Barnard’s Sappho: A New Translation (1958), the translation Cha was likely reading. Second, I argue that this inauthentic Sappho epigraph signals Cha’s alignment with the poetics of deception, creating literary links in this respect between Cha and Sappho’s own Muse, Aphrodite the “wile-weaver,” and with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (where Gaia participates in the deception of Persephone).
"Love and War in an Age of Revolution"
Speaker: Jennifer Heuer
Time: 11:20–11:30 a.m.
Drawing on my book, Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in an Age of The Soldier's Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, I will explore how more than two decades of warfare intersected with revolution to affect love and family life. Conversely, I also look at how contemporary changes in gender and family could be used to both legitimate prolonged warfare and negotiate transitions to peace.
"Carpet Craze: Oriental Rug Merchants in the West"
Speaker: Aviva Ben-Ur
Time: 11:30–11:40 a.m.
Beginning in the 1860s, thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants arrived in the West in search of new livelihoods and destinies. One of the products they disseminated in their adoptive lands was the Oriental carpet, a trade dominated by Armenian Christians and Sephardic Jews. This talk, based on a chapter from my book manuscript "Being Ottoman at the End of Empire," focuses on a sensational trial in 1930s Scotland that charged a "ring of Jews" with a massive scheme to artificially inflate the prices of imported rugs and defraud unsuspecting collectors and speculators. At the heart of the trial is the relationship between beauty and commerce, the power of capitalism to transform mercantile norms, and the vulnerability of Middle Eastern immigrants to scapegoat impulses.
"Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death"
Speaker: Jessica Barr
Time: 11:40–11:50 a.m.
In their biographies, ancient and medieval Christian saints are often described as yearning for death--but did they, really? While that question is unanswerable, in my forthcoming book, I investigate writings by and about medieval holy women to explore what they might have thought and felt about their own mortality. These women's at-times ambivalent responses to the prospect of death offer rich reflections on the meaning of life, as well, and on how to think about one's limited time on earth. While these medieval women's worldviews are in many ways quite distinct from our own, nonetheless I found that their reflections on mortality enriched my own understanding of what it means to die. In this talk, I'll discuss a couple of my key figures and how their theologies of death might affect our own ideas about dying—and living in the meantime.
Unusual pen pals. Italo Calvino and Renato Poggioli.
Speaker: Roberto Ludivico
Time: 11:50–12 a.m.
Italo Calvino, perhaps the most studied Italian author of the 20th century around the world, and Renato Poggioli, a lesser-known slavicist, translator, and comprativist who left fascist Italy in 1938 to pursue an academic career in New England, exchanged about sixty letters between 1952 and 1963, when Poggioli died. The correspondence between them has never been published nor studied, nor has it been noticed by anyone who may have had access to it, albeit partially. The reason for this unusual oversight may be found in the apparent distance between the personal and intellectual trajectory of these two men who lived worlds apart, literally, moving on parallel tracks apprently destined to never converge: a star and icon of international literary jet set Calvino, a tireless cultural mediator working in the shadows of academia Poggioli. Their ususpected friendship, and the private nature of their correspondence shed light on certain aspects of the cultural and political environment in post-WWII Italy and about Calvino’s desire to emancipate himself from it. The Calvino-Poggioli case also raises questions about the study of literature during times of political and ideological polarization and about the researcher’s responsibilities toward (recent) history and toward present society.
What's in a phrase?
Speaker: Kyle Johnson
Time: 12–12:10 p.m.
You may have learned in elementary school how to "parse" a sentence into its constituent parts. This is a common method of getting students to reflect on how to compose essays, or other written work. It taps into intuitions we all have about our spoken language, namely that words are grouped into phrases. This turns out to be a universal design feature of human languages. They all involve a method of coding information in which phrases play a central role. Moreover, there is a surprising degree of similarity in how phrases are constructed. In this talk, I will present some of the ways that phrases vary across languages, but also some ways in which they don't. I will try to give a glimpse of contemporary theories that linguists have developed in an effort to capture the underlying structures of human language that give rise to phrases.
Mingle and lunch
Time: 12:10–1 p.m.