Patricia Clare Ingham (Dept of English, University of Indiana)

The Rossell Hope Robbins Memorial Lecture: “New Worlds—Tracking an Enchanted History”

March 27, 2015    

7.30 p.m.

English Studies Conference Room of the Graduate Center, CUNY (room 4406)


A wine and cheese reception will follow the presentation and question time.

The year 1492 stands first among the markers of historical rupture, as the harbinger of a New Humanist Age, one enthusiastic about novelty (Grafton). According to this view, data mined from a “New World” revolutionized a bookish commitment to old geographies, and a medieval culture enamored with the power of tradition. This talk, drawn from the culminating chapter of my forthcoming book, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation, argues instead that the apparent opposition between “tradition” and “novelty” needs to be rethought, and that the case of Columbus can sharpen this rethinking. Early editions of the Letters of Columbus (such as those held at IU’s Lilly Library) demonstrate what it means that Columbus’s “New World” claims depended on a diverse set of recursions and repetitions, some imaginative, some editorial, some technical, and some desirous. I conclude by assessing the implications of this rethinking for the state of the question of “innovation” in the contemporary University.

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Christopher MacEvitt (Department of Religion, Dartmouth College)

“Good Martyr, Bad Martyr: Franciscan Death in the Early Fourteenth Century”

March 6, 2015


7.30 p.m.

English Studies Conference Room of the Graduate Center, CUNY (room 4406)
     A wine and cheese reception will follow the presentation and question time.

Martyrdom had become a charged subject for the Order in the early fourteenth century. The desire for martyrdom had been an important marker of sanctity since Francis, but in the thirteenth century those who actually died as martyrs were generally ignored. The account of the three martyrs who died in Tana, India in 1321 was the immediate catalyst for the quickening of interest in Franciscan martyrs; their passio spread rapidly through Franciscan accounts and frescoes. Early fourteenth-century stories about martyrs allowed Franciscans to think about three overlapping questions: could martyrdom be a part of an effective effort to evangelize Muslims? That is, could Franciscans transform the world through martyrdom? Or did Franciscans in dying express their opposition to the mundane world of desire and possession and thereby transcend it? And thirdly, did some combination of the first two allow Franciscans to depict martyrdom as victory over “Saracens,” especially in an era when other Christian forms of confrontation with Islamdom were failing? Most immediately, the passiones must be read in the context of the controversy over poverty among conventual Franciscans (those who trusted in obedience to hierarchical authority), rigorist spirituals, and a heavy-handed pope (John XXII), which led to spirituals being burned at the stake for heresy, and the leadership of the Order (though avowedly not spirituals) escaping the papal court in Avignon and labeling John himself a heretic. The stories were an attempt to reorder Franciscan spirituality and replace poverty with martyrdom as the highest expression of imitatio Christi, and to provide the Order with a common set of heroes that both spirituals and conventuals could admire.

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Professor Bob Hasenfratz (Department of English, University of Connecticut)
"The Old English Poetry Project"
Friday February 6, 2015
7.30 p.m.
The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)
English Studies Conference Room (4406)


Bob will lay out the history, aims, and future of the Old English Poetry Project (http://www.oepoetryproject.org), a growing digital archive of translations from Anglo-Saxon poetry, founded in 2014 with Miller Oberman, a poet and Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut. This archive will eventually contain base translations of the entire corpus of Old English poetry and will invite competing translations in a variety of styles and languages from students, scholars, and poets. The talk focuses on the challenges of translating Maxims I and II and explores the advantages of embracing a “foreignizing” effect proposed by translation theorists Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti. Representing the radical compression of Maxims I and II in a contemporary translation can produce some remarkably alienating effects that run counter to the desire to explain this difficult, but rewarding poetry.    

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“Global Medieval”: A Roundtable featuring
Hyunhee Park, Toy Tung, Tansen Sen, and Nahyan Fancy

December 5, 2014   
7.30 p.m.

The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)
English Studies Conference Room (4406)


Hyunhee Park (Department of History, John Jay College, CUNY), “Transfers of Geographical Knowledge in Eurasia during the Global Middle Ages”;

Toy Tung (Department of English, John Jay College CUNY), “Translation, Translatio and Globalization in Nāgārjuna and Gower”;

Tansen Sen (Department of History, Baruch), “The Zheng He Voyages and the Maritime World of the Early Fifteenth Century”;

Nahyan Fancy (Department of History, DePauw University), "The Movement of Medical Texts and Commentators in Western Eurasia after 1300.”

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