Reading (and Writing) the Book of Nature

While the book has long-served as a metaphor for Nature and our inquiries into it, books offer visual analogies and material genealogies to natural forms as well. If Nature was a tome to be interpreted in centuries past, then it is also a text that we continue to write today (for unknown readers in a distant future). The Anthropocene proposal, and geosciences generally, pose such possibilities. From sedimentary histories to botanical mysteries. This talk will discuss a few of Yang's projects that make use of books and libraries as both a muse and a medium for exploring our conceptions of the natural world as an archive, as well as perhaps a diary.

Sounding Waters: Elements of Water, Ice, and Snow in Sound and Music

March 1, 2024

Evan MacCarthy will offer a guided listening session of excerpts of works of music and sonic art of the last four centuries, which evoke the creative, destructive, and restorative forces of water. The program will highlight instruments fashioned from water or ice, the expressive, recorded sounds of flowing, dripping, and melting, as well as songs and instrumental works capturing images and echoes of seas, rivers, floods, glaciers, and storms. We will investigate how composers, musicians, and sound artists have found musical meaning in the watery depths, rising tides, and quickly changing states and qualities of water.

The Nature of Whiteness in "Henry V's" Theater of the Earth

April 10, 2023

The Early Modern Incubator Venn Vision group
Leslie Dartmouth Center for the Humanities
Dartmouth College

Marjorie Rubright is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst.
This talk attends to the terrestrial forces at play in Shakespeare’s Henry V as the chalky cliffs of Dover and pale coast of Calais are figuratively transformed from abutting battlefronts into forcibly conjoined human bodies. I argue that the play shuttles racialized whiteness across geological and epidermal surfaces, enlisting the earth itself in racializing the biopolitics of the Anglo-French accord. This terra-somatic process of transference stirs, first and foremost, inside the domains of philology. I linger inside these domains before returning to the play’s conclusion wherein, I propose, the play’s biopolitics is undergirded by philological inquiries into the geological feature that most defines the boundaries of Albion and the toponym ‘Albion’ itself. In so doing, the play poses a set of open methodological questions about how we read for the interplay of philology, geology, and embodiment in the ‘race-craft’ of the early modern period.

Ice-Blue: Toward a Poetics of Solid Water

March 12, 2024

Multimodal workshop on sonic and poetic icescapes with Steve Mentz (Professor of English, St. John's University), an early modern scholar and a pioneer of the Blue Humanities.

Steve Mentz teaches Shakespeare, literary theory, and the “blue humanities” with a focus on environmental questions. Responding in his research and teaching to ecological crisis has brought his work beyond Shakespeare to embrace oceanic culture, environmental philosophy, and artistic performances.

Figuring Race in Early Modern Drama

October 27, 2023

Annual Normand Berlin Lecture

Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called 'Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms' (2019). She is author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (U Penn 2023), which traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. Most recently, she has published, “Ecocriticism and the Geographies of Race” in The Sundial. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections.

Salt, Water, and Stone: The Ecology of Art in Renaissance Venice

March 21, 2023

Christopher Nygren is associate professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and art in the Italian Renaissance, and it has been featured in The Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, Word & Image, Modern Language Notes, and other leading academic journals. 

'The Sweet Marjoram of the Salad’: Abortifacient Plants and the Shakespearean Bed Trick

February 16, 2023

Will Steffen is an assistant professor of English at American International College in Springfield, MA. He earned his PhD from UMass Amherst in 2018. His dissertation, Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage, won the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize at the 2020 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. His forthcoming book, Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage, (April 2023, Oxford University Press) positions the early modern stage as a key resource in evaluating the role of human agency in the narrative about global climate change.

Climate in Words and Numbers: How Early Americans Recorded Weather in Almanacs

December 1, 2022

Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, where she teaches the histories of science, climate, colonialism, and environment. Professor Chaplin’s publications include The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), and (coauthored), The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (2016).

Orchestrating Shakespeare’s Storms

October 28, 2022

6th Annual Normand Berlin Memorial Lecture.

Evan MacCarthy is a Five College Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History in the Department of Music & Dance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on the history of fifteenth-century music and music theory, late medieval chant, German music in the Baroque era, as well as nineteenth-century American music. His book Ruled by the Muses: Italian Humanists and their Study of Music in the Fifteenth Century explores the musical lives of scholars who sought to revive the cultural and intellectual traditions of ancient Greece and Rome.