MIT Global France Seminar & Harvard Mahindra France and the World Seminar presents, A Conversation with Mathias Énard   When: Thursday February 15th @ 5:30pm Where: Barker Center, Room 114 This event is a part of Villa Albertine’s Authors on Tour program. Mathias Enard’s 2024 US tour is made possible by Villa Albertine and New Directions. Part of the France and the World series. Co-sponsored by the MIT French+ Initiative. Mathias Énard is the author of Compass  (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Zone, and Street of Thieves–as well as being a translator from Persian and Arabic. He will be speaking about his latest book, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild , out now in English translation with New Directions.

Presented by Amy Russell Associate Professor of Classics, Associate Professor of History at Brown University From myth to contract theory to the Third Reich, understandings of the notion of political community have often been expressed by calling back to its origins. Historians of the distant past are well qualified to talk about origin myths: the populus Romanus is the blueprint for many later notions of the sovereign People. But how does a group of individuals coalesce into a community, and how is that process gendered? I will explore the relationship between gender and the populus in Republican Rome, before mobilizing feminist approaches to explore how the legal and symbolic moves that define We the People have historically encoded violence against women; nevertheless, the past also offers ideas for alternative ways to think about what it means to belong to a political community. Amy Russell is a Roman political and cultural historian, with particular interests in Republican political culture, space, and gender. Her next major work will be a monograph on the institutional and cultural role of the populus Romanus, for which her preparations have included new collaborations with political scientists, historians, and lawyers on the construction of peoplehood across time and space. Image: […]