Come join Prof. Ruth Perry and fellow alumni to learn about The Ballad World of Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland. Prof. Perry’s new book contains the known facts and the family stories of the eighteenth-century Forbes and Gordons in the North-east of Scotland; an introduction to Scottish ballads, with examples from Anna Gordon’s repertoire; and an introduction to a middle-class woman’s education and social position during the Scottish Enlightenment.
It turns out that women were the tradition-bearers in Scottish balladry—this great verbal and musical art form of Anglo-American culture. Ballads are frequently thought of as depicting a violent, warrior society, but their scope is much wider—especially in the repertoires of women.
We will also have the opportunity to listen to some of these ballads while enjoying Scottish shortbread and beverages.
About the Author:
Prof. Ruth Perry has taught several graduate classes in the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies which she co-founded in 1991.
At MIT, where she taught literature for 50 years, she had a class on “The Folk Music of North American and the British Isles” cross-listed between Literature and Music, and literature classes on “Eighteenth- Century Travel Literature”, “Jane Austen, ” “Reading Fiction,” “Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” and feminist literary criticism, among others.
The holder of grants from the NSF, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, ACLS, and NEH, she has also been a fellow at the Bunting Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study in Edinburgh. In 2000, she was elected President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The founder of the MIT Women’s Studies program in 1984; she lectured on Women’s Studies and feminist criticism and Black Women’s writing in six cities on the east coast of China in the fall of 1987, taught the 18th C. English novel at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples in 1993, and lectured on the Scottish diaspora at the Sorbonne in the summer of 2013, in addition to other topics in less exotic places in the U.S. Of her more than sixty articles a third have been reprinted, some more than once.
Prof. Perry double majored in English and Social Psychology at Cornell University where she also completed an MA in physiological psychology. She received her PhD in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Register for the event here: https://boston.alumcommunity.mit.edu/events/139635