Events

From Eden
to the Anthropocene:
Shakespeare’s Natural History of Humankind

Engaging a conversation first opened by Amitav Ghosh on the challenges that climate crisis poses for representation, this talk explores early modern ideas about humanity’s cosmic situation – most particularly, the caveats and contingencies attached to our kind in relation to the natural world. Pliny’s Historia naturalis fueled the Renaissance expansion of natural history as a mode of representing “Nature.” But it also delivered a durable figure of human exposure that worked alongside the biblical account of human and planetary history, shaping the thought of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (and of Linnaeus, Darwin, and Rachel Carson, too). By these lights, we’ll rethink some familiar Shakespearean treatments of humanity’s relation to the natural surround (in As You Like It, A Winter’s Tale, King Lear, and Hamlet), to end with a closer look at the climate relations proposed in Sonnet 18. What “uses of adversity” might pre-Anthropocenic stories of environmental exposure and species calamity have discovered for us?

Laurie Shannon is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of Literature at Northwestern, having earned her JD from Harvard and her PhD from UChicago. She is author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts and The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales, which was awarded the Elizabeth Dietz Prize for best monograph in Renaissance literary studies by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (both from UChicago Press). She has held fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Warburg Institute. Having served as chair of the Executive Committee of the MLA Division on Shakespeare and as trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, Shannon also served two terms as chair of the English Department at Northwestern and is currently convenor of The Anne Lister Society. This talk stems from her current project, Frailty’s Name: Shakespeare’s Natural History of Humankind.

Frederic Ives Carpenter (1861-1925) was for many years an eminent professor of medieval and Renaissance literature in the Department of English. The Carpenter lectureship was endowed in 1925 to memorialize Professor Carpenter's personal commitment to the highest excellence in scholarship and teaching and to perpetuate that commitment in a broader way. The Carpenter lecturer generally spends a week at the University, with the centerpiece of the visit being a series of three lectures. The lecturer will, in addition, visit graduate workshops, hold office hours, and spend time informally engaged with faculty and students. Previous Carpenter Lecturers include Edward Said, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Catherine Gallagher, Michael Warner, Susan Buck-Morss, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Franco Moretti, and Jacqueline Rose, Elizabeth Grosz, and Rey Chow.

Recent Lectures

• Rey Chow: "Acousmatic Sound and the Writing Voice in Cinema: A Preliminary Discussion" (Autumn 2015)
• Elizabeth Grosz: "The Incorporeal" (Spring 2015)
• Bruno Latour: "Facing Gaia: American and European Perspective" and "The New Body Politik Requires a New Body" (October 2017)
• Maureen N. McLane: (Monday, April 20, 2020) "Conditional Poetics: Instruments, Elements, Plurality, Parameter;" (Wednesday, April 22, 2020) "Toward a Notational Poetics: Or, Now;" (Thursday, April 23, 2020) "A Reading of Poems and Divigations." Talks and reading will be held at 5:00 in the third-floor lecture hall of Swift Hall and are free and open to the public. Receptions on Monday and Thursday will follow.
• Frederick Moten. "The case of blackness: anthology, sociology, echomusecology" (Spring 2023)
• Lisa Lowe. "Colonial Histories of the Present” (Spring 2024)

Annual Graduate Student Conference

In recent years, the graduate students in the Department of English have held an autumn conference. Students organize the entire conference. A student committee decides on the conference topic, invites the keynote speaker, selects the papers for the conference, and runs the conference itself. Past conferences have included Visiting and Revisiting: Literature as a Special Form of Knowledge (2006), The Elements of Style (2007), Strange Reading: Practice, Audience, Theory (2008), Captive Senses and Aesthetic Habits (2009), Communicating Forms: Aesthetics, Relationality, Collaboration (2010), Exile on Main Street: Fascism, Emigration, and the European Imagination in America (2011), States of Suspension: Politics and Histories, Aesthetics and Affects (2012), Whole Worlds: Systems of Affect, Capital, Aesthetics (2013), Concussions, Commotions, and Other Aesthetic Disorders (2014), Words Unofficial: Gossip, Circulation, Mediation (2015), and Not Reading (2017).

Humanities Division Calendar of Events (lists division-wide events)

University of Chicago Calendar of Events (lists university-wide events)