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Litshop & AMS presents: Mark Letteney “Reframing Roman Incarceration

4-163 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, United States

Presented by: Mark Letteney ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the Literature Section, MIT When: Thursday, February 23rd - Doors open @ 5:00PM Where: Building 4, Room 4-163 Abstract: The Roman empire was a carceral state. Prisons dotted the landscape, but an overly credulous reading of legal sources has left Roman incarceration woefully understudied. This lecture outlines the archaeological evidence for Roman incarceration, and shows how archaeological record can help to reframe papyrological, legal, and literary sources for prisons in antiquity. This event is sponsored by the MIT Literature Section Workshop series (Litshop) and the Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium (MIT History & Literature).

Event Series Lit Tea

Lit Tea

14N-417

Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

Event Series Lit Tea

Lit Tea

14N-417

Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

MIT Literature Section presents, Lara Cohen “‘To Drop beneath the Floors of the Outer World’: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Undergrounds”

14E-304 160 MEMORIAL DR, CAMBRIDGE, MA, United States

Abstract: This talk focuses on Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), self-described “angular and eccentric” writer, Freedmen’s Bureau teacher, occultist, and sex magician. Antiblackness thwarted Randolph at every turn in his short life, but he contended that his experiences of alienation and hyperawareness had cultivated spiritual sensitivities that allowed him to access an unseen universe. Randolph wrote numerous handbooks, pamphlets, novels, memoirs, newspaper articles, and manifestos expounding his occult thought.

Event Series Lit Tea

Lit Tea

14N-417

Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

The People’s Poetry Archive presents: Solmaz Sharif

14E-304 160 MEMORIAL DR, CAMBRIDGE, MA, United States

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University.

Event Series Lit Tea

Lit Tea

14N-417

Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

Event Series Lit Tea

Lit Tea

14N-417

Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

AMS presents, Sonja Drimmer, “Is Book History the History of Books? Genealogies Between the Scroll and the Codex in Fifteenth-Century England”

14E-304 160 MEMORIAL DR, CAMBRIDGE, MA, United States

ABSTRACT: Book History, an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that became recognized as such in the second half of the twentieth century, relies on stories that scholars repeat until they have become truths. Among these stories are teleologies that rely on genealogical formulas of development: “from orality to literacy”; “from manuscript to print”; and “from roll to codex.” This talk will focus on the last of these formulas. Over the last two decades, an efflorescence of scholarship devoted to the abundant variety of scrolls and rolls in medieval Europe has offered welcome pushback to the supersessionist model that has reigned. Yet, the roll and the codex were not the only formats available for the book arts of the Middle Ages. Focusing on examples of books that are neither roll nor codex, and which played a decisive part during the Wars of the Roses, this talk will show the profound discrepancies between book history and the history of books and why these discrepancies matter. BIO: Sonja Drimmer is Associate Professor of medieval art history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania, 2018). IMAGE CAPTION Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England. London, after 1461. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Acc 2018 631. Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England. London, after 1461. Oxford […]

Litshop presents: Danielle Dorvil, “Recuperating Black Women’s Wisdom in Maria Firmina dos Reis’ Úrsula” & Tadiwa Madenga, “Pleasuring Pan-Africanism: The Sexual Politics of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair”

14E-304 160 MEMORIAL DR, CAMBRIDGE, MA, United States

Recuperating Black Women’s Wisdom in Maria Firmina dos Reis’ Úrsula  Presented by Danielle Dorvil Diversity Predoctoral Fellow at the Literature Section, MIT Abstract: Maria Firmina dos Reis’ debut novel has been acclaimed for her innovative depictions of enslaved Black subjects in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature. While the conversation has mostly centered on Reis’ Black male characters, I propose to examine her older, African female character’s unconventional—perhaps radical—view of emancipation. I will show how Susana’s thoughts on slavery and freedom betray Reis’ stance on the larger abolitionist debate occurring in Brazil at the time. --- Pleasuring Pan-Africanism: The Sexual Politics of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair Presented by Tadiwanashe Farida Madenga Diversity Predoctoral Fellow at the Literature Section, MIT Abstract: Created in the wake of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair was a space for national and Pan-African identities to be performed and re-invented. In 1995, former President Robert Mugabe banned the Gay and Lesbian organization from participating in the fair, provoking global debates on homosexuality and national sovereignty. In the midst of this censorship, Zimbabwean writers staged a political, social, and aesthetic critique of the state that centered on sexuality, or what some dreamers called erotic liberty, as a lens to reimagine national identity and […]

Event Series Lit Tea

Lit Tea

14N-417

Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

MIT Literature Section & the Phi Beta Kappa Society presents, Wendy Walls “Discovering New Poets, Discovering New Worlds: The Strange Case of Hester Pulter in Seventeenth-Century England”

14E-304 160 MEMORIAL DR, CAMBRIDGE, MA, United States

Presented by Wendy Wall Avalon Professor of the Humanities Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Professor of English at Northwestern University Abstract: The boundaries of the world exploded in early modern England. With telescopes aimed at the stars, microscopes revealing unseen elements of life on earth, and colonial encounters reconfiguring what Europeans knew about cartography and ecosystems, writers and artists grappled with uncertainty on many fronts. Shakespeare and Donne, for instance, offer rich meditations demonstrating the exhilaration and fear involving in imagining brave new worlds. How do newly audible literary voices in the early modern archive alter our understanding of this time of political, scientific, and religious transformations? The discovery of a seventeenth-century poet named Hester Pulter––a writer fascinated by Galileo’s findings, dancing atoms, and natural philosophy–– offers an occasion to reflect on what it means to push the limits of the known world, both in early modern terms – and our own. Bio: Wendy Wall is Avalon Professor of the Humanities, Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, and Professor of English at Northwestern University. Professor Wendy Wall researches topics as wide-ranging as Renaissance poetry, recipes, literature and science, women’s writing, digital humanities, gender, authorship, print culture, and theater. She specializes […]

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