Lynn Festa is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers. Her publications include Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (John Hopkins University Press, 2006) and, as co-editor, The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford University Press, 2009).

*Part of the 2012 Second Language Research Forum "Building Bridges Between Disciplines: SLA in Many Contexts"

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

This small colloquium will explore late medieval projects of crusades that advocated an expansion of Europe and European values into the Near East. Utopian visions as well as hard-headed economic and military considerations are the hallmark of the treatises proposing these proto-colonial plans.

The aim of the conference is to bring to the fore the medical context of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and to explore the complex connections between medicine and natural philosophy in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Medicine and natural philosophy interacted on many levels, from the practical imperative to restore and maintain the health of human bodies to theoretical issues on the nature of living matter and the powers of the soul to methodological concerns about the appropriate way to gain knowledge of natural things.

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

Joseph Luzzi is Associate Professor of Italian and Director of Italian Studies , and Co-Director of the first year seminar pro-gram at Bard College. . He received his Ph.D. in Italian Litera-ture from Yale university in 2000. Since then he has written a book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which has re-ceived the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association of America in 2009. He has also pub-lished reviews in the Los Angeles Times Book Review