Rita Copeland
Professor of Classical Studies and English
Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Professor in the Humanities
University of Pennsylvania

and

David Wallace
Judith Rotin Professor of English
University of Pennsylvania

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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Lecture:
Insinuating Authors
Rita Copeland

4:30 PM
Classics 110
Reception to follow.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Lecture:
Where Europe Begins and Ends: Conceptualizing Literary History, 1358 – 1418
David Wallace

4:30 PM
Rosenwald 405
Reception to follow.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Joint Workshop:
Naming, Knowing, and the Object of Language in Alexander Neckam’s Grammar Curriculum
Rita Copeland

Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory, 1347 – 1645
David Wallace

12:30 PM
Rosenwald 405
Lunch will be served.


Co-sponsored with the Western Mediterranean Workshop, the Renaissance Workshop, and the Program in Medieval Studies.

Please contact Kristin Lueke at klueke@uchicago.edu or visit http://british.uchicago.edu/critical#copelandwallace for copies of the papers.


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Rita Copeland works across a number of fields and periods, including: medieval literature (English, Latin, French); literary theory from ancient to modern; the history of rhetoric; the reception of classical traditions in medieval and early modern Europe; intellectuals, learning, and literacy in medieval Europe. Professor Copeland’s teaching combines her interests in antiquity and the Middle Ages–or how the Middle Ages understood antiquity.  Among her current projects are the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature vol. 1, The Middle Ages, and essays on medieval Latin annotation and glossing and on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in medieval England.  She is also interested in representations of the intellectual in pre-modern Europe, from late antique rhetorical culture to late medieval university cultures and heretical communities.  Recent books include: Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric:  Language Arts and Literary Theory AD 300-1475, co-authored with Ineke Sluiter; and The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, co-edited with Peter Struck.  Professor Copeland is a co-founder of the annual New Medieval Literatures, and co-editor, with Jill Ross, of Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric, a new book series from Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

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David Wallace is a medievalist who looks forward to the early modern period; he works on English and Italian matters (and is a member of the Center for Italian Studies) with additional interests in French, German, women’s writing, romance, “discovery” of the Americas and the history of slavery, and Europe. Professor Wallace is currently editing a literary history of Europe, 1348-1418, a work of 600,000 words in 82 chapters to be published by Oxford University Press and supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. This is organized not by ‘national blocks’ (English literature, Spanish literature, etc.) but rather by nine sequences of places, or itineraries. It assumes that the space of ‘Europe’ becomes intelligible only through dialogue with that which forms its ‘outside,’ or dialogues with it. There is an interactive website (designed and maintained by DW and Brian Kirk): http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/regeneration/

Professor Wallace has made a series of radio documentaries for BBC Radio 3 with producer Paul Quinn: God’s First Englishman (2003), a program on the local and international cultures of the Venerable Bede; The Miraculous Journey of Margery Kempe (2005), retracing the voyage taken by Margery Kempe in 1433 as narrated by Book II of her Book; and Malory’s Morte Darthur: A Tale of Two Texts (2007). His most recent book is Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn. Other recent publications include: Periodizing Women: Mary Ward and the Premodern Canon; The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (ed. with Carolyn Dinshaw, 2003), and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (ed. 1999, 2002).

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These events are free and open to the public. Persons who require assistance to participate fully in these events should contact Kristin Lueke at klueke@uchicago.edu or 773.834.3403.