UCI’s Medieval Devysings is excited to host Shannon Gayk, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, whose expertise spans late-medieval religious writing, poetry and poetics, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, visual and material culture, and experiential learning.
Her talk, “Becoming Beholden: Floods, Fires, and Acts of Attention,” delves into the question of what it means to be beholden to a dying world, bringing medieval texts into conversation with our contemporary moment. Drawing from her forthcoming book, Apocalyptic Ecologies: Medieval Religious Literature and the Environmental Imagination, this talk explores how premodern accounts of biblical flood and fire probe the ethics of seeing ecological catastrophe and responding to the suffering it generates.
Professor Gayk’s groundbreaking work reveals that medieval representations of catastrophe are not always what we might expect. Rather than emphasizing human dominion over or contempt for the physical universe, medieval writers often reimagined their biblical sources and used distinctive formal strategies to invite attention to and connection with a suffering world. Here she aims to model how early literature might help us see ourselves and the world we inhabit in new ways.
Please contact Rebecca Davis (radavis@uci.edu) if you have any questions about the event. All are welcome!
Medieval Race Reading Group
This fall we’ll be discussing a Middle English romance called the King of Tars (and Introduction) along with Cord Whittaker’s “Black Metaphors in the King of Tars.”
All are welcome!
If you have any questions, please feel free to email Rebecca Davis (radavis@uci.edu).
For our initial meeting, we’ll be reading articles by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sara Ahmed along with an excerpt from Isidore’s Etymologies. We also encourage participants to read the following short blogs and newspaper articles, which provide context for the current conversations in the field and the particular urgency of these issues for medievalists:
- “On Race and Medieval Studies” https://medievalistsofcolor.com/statements/on-race-and-medieval-studies/
- “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy” http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/teaching-medieval-studies-in-time-of.html
- “Medievalists, Recoiling from White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field” https://www.chronicle.com/article/Medievalists-Recoiling-From/240666
- “Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville” https://newrepublic.com/article/144320/racism-medievalism-white-supremacists-charlottesville
- “Race and Identity in Medieval Europe” https://www.aaihs.org/race-and-identity-in-medieval-europe/
Please join us on June 8 and June 9 for screenings and discussion of “Two Winter’s Tales.” Recommended reading available here.
Please join us on June 3 for “Troubling the Muses,” a public seminar. Readings available here.
On March 13 the cluster will host a special seminar on “Loving/Reading” to welcome our visiting Ph.D. program recruits. Please join us from 3:30-5pm in HIB 341. Readings available here.
Please join us on March 6 for a seminar on the “Song of Orpheus.” Readings available here.
On February 20, 2015 the cluster will co-sponsor a day-long symposium titled The Matter of Beauty: Questions of Form and Meaning. The symposium features three invited speakers, Sarah Beckwith (Duke), Maura Nolan (UC Berkeley), and Andrew Cole (Princeton), and three UCI respondents, Julia Lupton, Elizabeth Allen, and James Steintrager.
On December 5, 2014 the cluster met for the first time around a shared reading on lunar poetics. The readings are available here.