Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing, medieval and early modern drama, and ordinary language philosophy. In this seminar, we will discuss chapter three of her most recent book, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Cornell, 2011). Professor Beckwith is also the author of Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago, 2001), and Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing (Routledge, 1993).

From medieval pogroms to modern racial science, Jewish history in Europe has come to stand as a test case for thinking about problems of historical continuity and change, embodied most clearly in the tension between narratives emphasizing a timeless antisemitism and arguments for the distinctive mentalities associated with discrete historical periods.

Prevailing accounts of the development of baroque sculpture take for granted the centrality of Gianlorenzo Bernini without probing the historical processes that led to the dominance of his art. The book Dr. Estelle Lingo is preparing takes the self-consciously ambitious sculptures of Bernini’s older contemporary, the Tuscan Francesco Mochi (1580-1654), as the entry point for an inquiry into the historical and cultural forces driving the transformation of sculpture in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The great naval Battle of Lepanto of 1571 in which the Turkish armada was devastated by the combined fleet of the Papacy, Venice, and Spain was an event of enormous symbolic as well as military importance to the Catholic Church, because it briefly gained for the Christian Alliance control of most of the Mediterranean, temporarily eradicating the threat of the “infidel”. Several Italian and Spanish artists depicted the battle but none so splendidly as Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace.

Sarah Alison Miller joined the Classics department at Duquesne University in 2008. Professor Miller received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008). Her book, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (Routledge 2010), argues that the female anatomy and its physiological processes were marked as “monstrous”
in medieval medical, erotic, and religious literature.

James Knapp (English) and Peggy Knapp (Carnegie Mellon) will present:

"Aesthetics of Time: the Case of the Middle English Sir Orfeo,"
with responses from Ryan McDermott (English) and Daniel Selcer (Duquesne).

In the Renaissance, studying nature meant (most of the time) encountering nature. But these encounters, as Peter Dear has indicated, tended to generate a discussion (in the period and in the historiography) between unmediated sensory experiences and experiences organized by prior conceptual categories. This paper focuses on anatomical encounters, when anatomists articulated that distinction with clarity, in order to reconsider the significance of ephemeral and permanent anatomy theaters.

The relationship between the two is usually described chronologically:

Dennis Looney is a professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, with secondary appointments in Classics and Philosophy. Publications
include: Compromising the Classics (1996); Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and Its Culture (2005); ‘My Muse will have a story to paint’:

This talk revisits the concept of orientalism in a long chronological context, including 4th Century BC Athens, Elizabethan and Caroline England, Enlightenment Europe, and colonial and contemporary New Zealand.
It seeks to identify a specifically geographic component of this construct, which historians have neglected.

Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland.

Cultural night out at Jozsa Hungarian restaurant for GSPIA graduate students.