Join us for an evening with Dr. Joshua Bennett. In this presentation, MIT Professor and award-winning author Dr. Joshua Bennett will share selections from his latest books—Spoken Word: A Cultural History and The Study of Human Life—while also offering reflections on the craft of storytelling, the art of the spoken word, and his individual journey as a writer and educator. September 29th @ 6:00pm - 7:30pm Register here | Learn more here This program is presented as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Admission is free. Seating is limited and pre-registration is strongly encouraged. Please note that all seats will be released to the general public 10 minutes prior to the program’s start time. To guarantee a seat, please arrive early.  

Join us for an evening with Dr. Joshua Bennett. In this presentation, MIT Professor and award-winning author Dr. Joshua Bennett will share selections from his latest books—Spoken Word: A Cultural History and The Study of Human Life—while also offering reflections on the craft of storytelling, the art of the spoken word, and his individual journey as a writer and educator. September 29th @ 6:00pm - 7:30pm Register here | Learn more here This program is presented as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Admission is free. Seating is limited and pre-registration is strongly encouraged. Please note that all seats will be released to the general public 10 minutes prior to the program’s start time. To guarantee a seat, please arrive early.  

John Murillo is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University. He is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher, 2010; Four Way Books 2020), which was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way, 2020); the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award; and a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Believer Poetry Award, Maya Angelou Book Award, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, and the NAACP Image Award. The People’s Poetry Archive is a 2023-24 Mellon Faculty Grant Project by Professor Joshua Bennett. It is a public humanities project setting out to digitally preserve canonical and contemporary poems from across the African diaspora, as well as historically under-theorized works in the realm of spoken word performance. Inspired by the Black feminist poet and educator June Jordan’s vision of “a people’s poetry”—a term she traces to the democratic imaginings of Walt Whitman—the creation of the archive represents an opportunity to address modern questions about the vitality and utility of poetry through sustained cross-pollination between institutions and social scenes. The project is an opportunity for […]

Abstract: Conjectural emendation is one long-established method of last resort by which editors deal with nonsensical or missing portions of ancient and medieval texts. It is often controversial even as a last resort because it relies upon conjecture—the editor’s subjective sense of the text or author in question—rather than the empiricism by which textual editing has tended to define itself. This talk uses a single contested word in line 735 of the medieval poem Pearl to propose ’speculative expansion’ as an alternative to conjectural emendation. I ground this proposal in theories of speculation as developed by medieval philosophers and theologians, for whom it served as a midpoint between cognition and contemplation, subtended by both thought and feeling. I propose expansion rather than emendation so as to respect the inherent multiplicity of literary and aesthetic meaning, which Pearl in particular performs with exquisite beauty. With the audience’s help, I also hope to think through the practical ramifications of such theories upon readers today. Bio: Arthur Bahr is the author of Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight (Chicago, 2024) and Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago, 2013). With Alexandra Gillespie, he co-edited a special issue of The Chaucer Review (47.4, 2013) on “Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text.” […]

Tuesday, November 7th @ 5:00pm Building 14, Room 14E-304 (map)   Presented by: Eric Driscoll, Lecturer in Ancient and Medieval Studies Literature & History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology   Abstract: This talk offers a reading of Kostas Vrettakos’s 1980 documentary short, The Layer of Destruction, in the context of the modern Greek archaeological and folkloric imaginaries. In the 1970s, Greece constructed a dam across the Mornos river, near the southern end of the Pindus Mountains, to create a reservoir that would supply Athens with drinking water. Today, below the waters of this artificial lake lie the remains of an ancient city, Kallipolis or Kallion. In Layer of Destruction, Vrettakos creates a lyrical memorial for Kallion by depicting his visits to the excavations conducted in the late 1970s as the reservoir’s rising waters threatened and eventually covered the site. In the Greek national narrative, archaeological excavation is conceived as an additive process that recovers what Yannis Hamilakis calls “fragments of national memory” and thereby restitutes missing fragments of a collective history. But in Vrettakos’s film, archaeology emerges instead as a form of destruction, a force that—in the language of Jacob Taubes—reinserts time into eternity and suggests that “the order of the world is gripped by […]