| Date & Time: | 5/21/2010 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM | | Department: | Early Cultures | | Event Title: | Theology, Theater and Critical Enthusiasm: A Conversation with this
Year's Ahmanson-Getty Fellows | | Place: | HG 1002 |
| 12.00 -- Buffet lunch, mingling with group
13.00 -- 15.30 Presentations (30 min.) plus Discussion
16.00 -- Coffee with graduate students
Contact person: Ulrike Strasser
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Thomas Lolis holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami. Recent publications include “The City of Witches: James I, the Unholy Sabbath, and the Homosocial Refashioning of the Witches’ Community” in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the History of Philosophy. Dr. Lolis has recently completed a book-length manuscript (titled Searching for Eden: Magic and Mapmaking in the Renaissance) on the intersections between cartography and occult philosophy in early modern England and Europe.
Dr. Lolis’ current project is focused on the Philadelphian Society, a theological movement that counted Christian mystics, poets, alchemists, and political dissenters among its numbers. This project, "Visionary Publishing: The Philadelphian Society and the Religion of Dissent," investigates the ways in which the Philadelphians, chiefly through the publications of Jane Leade, disseminated a distinct type of visionary experience, the influence of which is observable well beyond the relatively brief lifespan of the Society itself. Additionally, this project places the Philadelphian Society in the context of a culture that struggled with and against the limitations of Protestant rebellion.
His presentation is entitled "The Heavenly Cloud Now Circling: Jane Leade and the Trap of Theological Mediation"
Brendan M. Prawdzik recently received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied early modern poetry, prose, and drama. He is currently revising his doctoral dissertation into a first book. He has two articles – on Milton's Ludlow Maske and Milton's anti-prelatical prose -- forthcoming. He as an additional interest in ecocriticism working on landscape and textiles as sites of historical mediation in Marvell's Upon Appleton House.
Dr Prawdzik’s current book project Milton on Stage: Drama, Sin, and the Holy Script examines Milton's career-long interest in theater in terms of his scriptural poetics. It contends that Milton frequently incorporates the actors, audiences, and theater spaces of dramatic performance in order to harness theater as a productive problem, as a potent medium capable both of bolstering and unsettling authority. Like reformers George Buchanan and Theodore Beza, Milton embraces the stage as a privileged scriptural vehicle “doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation.” Yet he also inverts conventional anti-theatrical concerns about representation, imitation, and audience corruptibility, exploring the audience’s potentially insidious influence upon the actor and author. With its inextricable benefits and dangers, theater comes to negotiate Milton’s relationship with his audience and to condition an ethics and poetics based upon creative responses to scripture. Through the lens of theater, the project examines Milton's unstable and evolving relation to radical Protestant enthusiasm and scriptural exegesis. It considers Milton's adoption of the stage to scrutinize the author's role as a mediator between the Word and the reader.
His presentation is entitled “Milton's Tiring House and the Histrionics of Spirituality.”
Jordana Rosenberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at
the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She received her PhD from Cornell
University. Current and forthcoming publications include: "Prophesying the
Past: Secularism, Historicism and the Critique of Enthusiasm," The Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation (2010); "The Future Historical Perspective:
Mieville's Queer Duree," GLQ 16.5; "Queer Studies and the Crises of
Capitalism," co-editor with Amy Villarejo, forthcoming as a special issue of
GLQ; "The Terrestrial Transatlantic: Ground Rent and Capital Accumulation in
Dorset and the Carolina Colony," in Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth
Century, eds. Jennifer Frangos and Cristobal Silva, Cambridge Scholars Press,
forthcoming January 2009; "Serious Innovation: A Conversation with Judith
Butler," in The Blackwell Companion to GLBT/Q Studies Reader; "Reading Lessons:
Rasselas with The Matrix," The Johnsonian Newsletter 55, no. 1 (March
2004); "The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's Belinda ," ELH , vol. 70, no.
2 (Summer 2003); "Butler 's 'Lesbian Phallus' or, What Can Deconstruction
Feel?" GLQ 9.3 (Spring 2003).
Professor Rosenberg's current book project, "Critical Enthusiasm: Capital
Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion," concerns itself with
two major, interrelated phenomena of the early eighteenth century: the onset of
capital accumulation and the loosening of religious discourse to describe
intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical experiences. Although this pairing may
appear heterodox, the underlying argument of "Critical Enthusiasm" is that the
effects of modernization have frequently been described through the language of
religion, and that, for this reason, economic development often takes
contradictory or counterintuitive forms at the level of culture. The project
explores the intersection of religious enthusiasm and capital accumulation in
moral philosophy, poetry, legal discourse, and political theory.
The title for her presentation is "Secularization Studies and Critical
Geography: The Celestial Critique of Secular Space" |
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