Scholar in Residence Terry Eagleton
February 10-14
The Page-Barbour Lectures Committee Presents “Hope without Optimism”
Tuesday, February 11:”The Banality of Optimism”
Wednesday, February 12: “What is Hope?”
Thursday, February 13: “Hope Against Hope”
All lectures take place in the Harrison Small Auditorium at 4 pm with reception to follow.
“Blissful Dead, Desperate Dead: Purgatory Goes to Hell in Early Modern Spain”
A Lecture by María Tausiet
Wednesday, March 5
4 pm
Harrison Institute Auditorium
Is happiness mankind’s natural state? What fate was thought to await the dead in the afterlife? As opposed to the strict dualism of heaven and hell, the invention of Purgatory at the end of the twelfth century provided a third way: the opportunity of purification after death before attaining ultimate glory. María Tausiet explores how the radical optimism of this idea faded in the seventeenth century, when Purgatory, organized in accordance with the rules of earthly justice, became an actual branch of hell.
María Tausiet is a leading Spanish cultural historian who now lives in Madrid. From 2008 to 2011 she was a fellow at Spain’s premier research institute, Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. She has published eight books and numerous essays on witchcraft and magic, demonic possession, and the history of emotions. Her most recent work to appear in English translation is Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipontens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her residency at the University of Virginia is sponsored by the Buckner W. Clay Foundation.
“Rethinking the Humanities in Korea”
A Lecture by Youngmin Kim
Tuesday, March 18
3:15-5pm
Monroe Hall 130
Youngmin Kim is Professor of English at Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea. This lecture, part of the 2013-14 East Asia Center lecture series, will philosophize and rethink the global transnational issue of the famous perennial “crisis in the humanities.”
Co-sponsored by the IHGC.
Daniel Mendelsohn
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic
March 20
6 pm
Harrison Institute Auditorium
Daniel Mendelsohn is a distinguished scholar in Classics, an award-winning memoirist and translator, a literary and cultural critic of extraordinary range, and a public intellectual of great note. His essays have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. He won the National Books Critics Circle Award for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; his recent collection of essays, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (2012), was widely and highly honored. Daniel Mendelsohn is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Virginia.
This event is a part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.
Geoffrey O’Brien
Poetry Reading
April 4
7 pm
The Bridge PAI
Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013). He is also the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from The University of California Press. His chapbooks include Hesiod (Song Cave, 2010), and Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions, 2010). He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (Minus A Press, 2012) and (in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark) of 2A (Quemadura, 2006). O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.
This and all “Outside the Window” readings are co-sponsored by UVA Contemporary Poetry & Poetics Working Group, The Bridge PAI, The Piedmont Council for the Arts, The UVA English Department, and the University of Virginia Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures.
Graduate English Student Association Annual Conference
“Reading Then and Now”
April 4-6
From Socrates to Tina Brown, cultural critics have been lining up to bury the book for millennia. Yet, in spite of the predictions of the Greeks, the early printers, and more recent heralds, literature just won’t die. One sign? A survey of recent titles from the U. of Chicago press offers 1,680 books with “reading” in their description. Another? The insistent textual qualities of even the most recent social media. Persisting through one technological revolution after another and despite cultural sea changes, reading continues to evolve, to inform, and to sustain modern cultures.
The Future of Graduate Studies
February 7
2 pm
Alderman Electronic Classroom
Graduate education has changed radically within the last generation, and it’s clear to all that more change lies ahead. What do we expect? What should we hope for? What shall we try to make for ourselves? Now is a time to think collectively about central problems and possibilities, including new forms of graduate education, prospects for employment, the opportunities for cross-departmental and inter-disciplinary study, the relations between grad students and faculty, the nature of the dissertation.
David Barr (Religious Studies), Ari Blatt (French), Laura Goldblatt (English) Anna Kim (Art History), Cecilia Márquez (History), Bethany Nowiskie (Scholars’ Lab), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Media Studies), and Chad Wellmon (German) will offer short presentations followed by open discussion.
Poetry Reading by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
February 7
7 pm
The Bridge PAI
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two books of poetry. Her 2006 book, The Last Time I saw Amelia Earhart, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing, was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Both were published by Persea Press.
The Outside the Window: Contemporary Poetry at UVA series is co-sponsored by the UVA Contemporary Poetry & Poetics Working Group, The Bridge PAI, The Piedmont Council for the Arts, The UVA English Department, and the IHGC.
UVA East Asia Center Spring Lecture Series
January 24, 31, and February 7
4:15-6pm
Monroe Hall 130
Three talks by three different scholars will take place in January and February. First, on January 24, we welcome Yoonjeong Seo, PhD candidate in Art History at UCLA, whose talk is entitled “The Sacred Past and the Celebrated Present: Chinese Figural Subjects in the Commemorative Court Painting of the Choson Dynasty in Korea.” Next, on January 31, Benedetta Lori, Associate Lecturer of Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes College, will give a talk entitled “Picturing Texts: Reflections on the Expressive Strategies of Medieval Japanese Collections.” Finally, Robert Goree, Lecturer in Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Boston University, will speak on Landmarks, Pictures, and Popular History in Early Modern Japan.
All talks will take place in Monroe 130 from 4:15-6pm.
Negotiating Contact: A Conference on Quebec Literature
January 17, 2014
Lower West Room, Rotunda
The conference will bring together scholars from Quebec and the United States working on different perspectives in Quebec literature and film in order to examine more closely the relationships between this literature, the academic French field, and the American context. It is our hope that by bringing together these diverse perspectives, we will be able to critically and creatively engage with the role that Quebec literature plays in our larger conception of French studies, including at UVA.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of French and the IHGC.