• Feb 6: Jordan Finkin, "The Shtetl as a Jewish Literary Homeland" --  5 -6:30 pm – Semitic Museum; 6 Divinity Ave, rm 201

• Feb 16:  Yosefa Raz, "Treading on Thin Ice: The Weak Prophetic of H.N. Bialik and U.Z. Greenberg” – 4 – 5:30 pm. – Semitic Museum; 6 Divinity Ave, rm 201

• Feb 23: Ilana Pardes, "Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs as Cultural Text" – 4 – 5:30 pm. Yenching Institute, 2 Divinity Ave. Common Room #136

Delia Ungureanu

“The Abookalypse and the Ring of Power: the Securitate and the Destruction of the Literary Circle of Sibiu”

Wednesday – February 15, 2012 – 7:00 pm

Dana Palmer House, 16 Quincy Street

Abstract:

In the forty-five years of Romania’s Communist regime, the Secret Police, the Securitate, covertly worked to eliminate any form of opposition, from the political to the intellectual and the literary. The story of the Literary Circle of Sibiu, a resistant group of poets and critics, unfolds in the Secret Files of the Securitate as the perfect mirror of the Communists’ politics of dividing and conquering. Drawing on discoveries in the Securitate’s archives, in this talk I will look into these writers’ struggles, involving literary and political resistance, friendship and betrayal, as aesthetic strategies become political and, finally, existential.

Bio:

Delia Ungureanu is a Lecturer in the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Bucharest, where she received her Ph.D. this past fall. She works on canonicity and the literary canon, on comparative European poetics, and on modern English, French, Italian, and Romanian literatures, and has published articles in English and French as well as scholarship and literary journalism in Romanian. Her dissertation, The Disequilibria of the Literary Field and the Rise of Ideology in Romanian Literary Magazines (1944-1947), will appear in book form this year, at the Bucharest University Press.

CHAD KIA
Feb. 16, 2012 - at 5.30pm
Dana Palmer House

ABSTRACT
Figurative and Figural Allusions in the Medieval Literature of Persian Sufism

On the intersection of the visual language of pictorial representation and the verbal imagery of poetic description--particularly in the allegorical form--the paper will focus on the literary and visual cultures of mysticism in the eastern Islamic world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The phenomenal rise in the popularity of mysticism in the post-Mongolian-invasion Islamic world had by the fifteenth century resulted in the penetration of Sufi discourse into the language of literary works, not least those commissioned for illustration. What followed--the main topic of this presentation--is the advent of allegorical painting based on the contemporary literary discourse of Islamic mysticism and an intertextual system of signification that united literary
discourse and esoteric religious practice over a period of centuries.

BIOGRAPHY
Chad Kia is a Lecturer in Persian Literature and Culture at the Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He received his PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2009 and was, for two years, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. In 2008, he was a Smithsonian fellow at the Freer-Sackler Galleries of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. His research concentrates on the relationship of medieval Persian poetry to figurative manuscript paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His previous article on the nexus of word and image in Persian
illustrated manuscripts was published in Muqarnas in 2007. His forthcoming “Sufi Orthopraxis: Visual Language and Verbal Imagery in Medieval Afghanistan” will appear in Word & Image in June 2012.

Silke-Maria Weineck (Univ. Michigan)
“Hobbes and the Revolution in Paternity”

March 8, 5:30 – 7 pm
Dana Palmer House Seminar Room (16 Quincy Street)

We are thrilled to welcome the internationally acclaimed Egyptologist and cultural theorist, Jan Assmann (Professor Emeritus, Heidelberg), who will give this year’s Renato Poggioli Lecture. Assmann’s innovative books on Egyptian Religion and its European afterlife, the legacy of monotheism, and theories of cultural memory have had an important and lasting impact on Comparative Studies. We are all anticipating an engaging and altogether inspiring lecture.

  Congratulations to Luke Taylor for receiving the Luisa Vidal de Villasante Award for 2011.

Congratulations to Christine Lee and to Daniel Frim, graduate and undergraduate recipients of the Susan Anthony Potter Prize for 2011.

Congratulations to Rita Banerjee for receiving the Tom and Laurel Nebel Graduate Fellowship for her dissertation writing and research.

We proudly announce that four of the twenty-two 2010-11 Hoopes Prizes in the Humanities were awarded to undergraduate concentrators in Literature. The Hoopes Prize is given "for the purpose of "promoting, improving, and enhancing the quality of education . . . in literary, artistic, musical, scientific, historical, or other academic subjects made part of the College curriculum under Faculty supervision and instruction, particularly by recognizing, promoting, honoring, and rewarding excellence in the work of undergraduates and their capabilities and skills in any subject, projects of research in science or the humanities, or in specific written work of the students under the instruction or supervision of the Faculty."

The Literature winners are:

-Rebecca Cooper, "Quo Vadis: The Life and Literary Philosophy of David Foster Wallace." Sally Livingston, advisor; Christopher Johnson, mentor.

-Nell Hawley, "Bhasa's Karnabharam: A Bold Look at a Beloved Hero." Luke Taylor, advisor; Anne Monius, mentor.

-Oliver Strand, "The Web on the Wall, the Moon in the Sea: Reality, the Imagination and Modernist Aesthetics." Björn Kühnicke, advisor; Dan Albright, mentor.

-Luzi Yang, "Displaced Relics: Zhang Zao's Post-Misty Poetics: A Translation and Critical Study." John Kim, advisor; Steve Owen, mentor.

Barbara Johnson Memorial Prize:

 We are pleased to announce that Marina Connelly won the first annual Barbara Johnson Memorial Prize for her Junior Essay entitled “Words for God: a study of religious text as psychoanalytic transitional phenomenon.”