upcoming events

SEWANEE, TN - “Shuddering Witnesses”
Apr
10
to Apr 11

SEWANEE, TN - “Shuddering Witnesses”

This paper will take up horror in its etymological sense as a shuddering kind of experience. I trace how this concept attaches to a particular mode of witnessing from Plato (particularly through his fifteenth-century Latin translator, Ficino, who used the word exhorreo to translate the Greek δυσχεραίνοι, often now translated as “disgust" on account of the influence of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) to Augustine (who asked: "What sensual pleasure is to be had in viewing a mangled corpse which causes you to shudder (exhorreas)? Yet if there is one lying anywhere, people congregate in order to be afflicted and turn pale,” Conf. 10.35.55). I deploy these examples to break down the affective border between the instinctive and the performative in the act of witnessing a horrible sight. 

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NYC - Turning Away & The Bronze Arms - in conversation with Richie Hofmann
Apr
17

NYC - Turning Away & The Bronze Arms - in conversation with Richie Hofmann

A reading and conversation with Poet Richie Hofmann, author of collection The Bronze Arms, and Benjamin A. Saltzman, author of Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. 

Richie Hofmann is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous books, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.

Benjamin A. Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.

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LOS ANGELES, CA - Turning Away - New Book Salon with Bronwen Wilson and David Russell
Apr
22

LOS ANGELES, CA - Turning Away - New Book Salon with Bronwen Wilson and David Russell

A conversation with Bronwen Wilson (UCLA, Art History) and David Russell (UCLA, English) about Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Followed by a Q&A

Image: Fra Angelico and workshop, Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene, and Saint Dominic(ca. 1440–45).

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STANFORD, CA - Turning Away - Methods Café - In conversation with Mark Greif and Miriam Kamil
Apr
28

STANFORD, CA - Turning Away - Methods Café - In conversation with Mark Greif and Miriam Kamil

  • Stanford University, Margaret Jacks Hall, Terrace Room (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Ben Saltzman will be in conversation with Mark Greif (Stanford, English) and Miriam Kamil (Stanford, Classics) about Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.

Discounted copies of Turning Away will be available for purchase.

Image: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875) (detail)

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BERKELEY, CA - Turning Away - Book Chat with Martin Jay
Apr
29

BERKELEY, CA - Turning Away - Book Chat with Martin Jay

  • UC Berkeley, Townsend Center for the Humanities (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

A conversation with Martin Jay on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, followed by a Q&A.

Martin Jay is the Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of nineteen previous books, including The Dialectical Imagination, Marxism and Totality, Downcast Eyes, and Songs of Experience.

Image: Susan Meiselas, Neighbors watch as dead bodies are burned in the streets of Estelí, Nicaragua (1979). Detail.

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KALAMAZOO, MI - “Adam and Eve's Queer Gestures”
May
16

KALAMAZOO, MI - “Adam and Eve's Queer Gestures”

  • International Congress on Medieval Studies (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Looking at medieval images of Adam and Eve in which they are depicted covering their faces and turning away from one another (e.g., in the Junius Manuscript), this paper will think through the queer resonances of their gesture in the work of Nigerian-British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

Image: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose I (Bodies of Experience), 1989

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