Poetry and Usury: Symbolic Economies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

5:00 pm to 7:00 pm, 31 October 2018

This talk builds on Professor Bates' last book, On Not Defending Poetry (2017), in which an “economic” reading of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy suggests that, despite appearances to the contrary, Sidney was not in fact wedded to defending poetry on grounds of its profitability, after all, since this otherwise respectable, humanist argument is shown to reveal potentially unacceptable complicities with a capitalist ethos of accumulation and growth. Professor Bates' new project, still very much in its early stages, aims to explore ways in which Shakespeare goes on to probe Sidney’s alternatively aesthetic, “profitless” model of art by focusing on the question of usury in the Sonnets. Using this focus to intertwine three different forms of production – making money, making men, and making art – Shakespeare develops ideas that remain largely intuited in Sidney’s text, to show that, in its relation to capital, poesis necessarily involves both complicity and critique.

Catherine Bates is Research Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. She works on English Renaissance poetry and has published five monographs on the subject: most recently, 'On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney's Defence of Poesy’ (2017, Oxford University Press), and Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford University Press, 2013), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2015. She is also editor of a number of edited collections, most recently A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Wiley Blackwell, 2018). She has held a Solmsen Research Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2014/15) and a Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington (2017/18). For academic year 2018/19 she is Visiting Research Fellow at the IES.

This event is organised by UCL Early Modern Exchanges, which is part of the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Venue: Foster Court - Open to All

Room 307, Foster Court, Malet Place, London  WC1E 6BT

Organiser:
Early Modern Exchanges:  lucy.stagg@ucl.ac.uk
Room 307, Foster Court, Malet Place, London  WC1E 6BT

Early Modern Exchanges: Being Black in Tudor England / Being English in Mughal India

Mar 14, 2018 05:00 PM
Location: IAS Seminar Room 20, first floor, South Wing, UCL

Black Tudors: Three Untold Stories

Dr. Miranda Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans: a diver employed by Henry VIII to recover guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose, a Moroccan woman baptised in Elizabethan London, and a porter who whipped a fellow servant at their master’s Gloucestershire manor house.

Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She read History at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed her doctoral thesis on 'Africans in Britain, 1500-1640' in 2011. As a freelance historian and journalist, she has worked for The Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Companion series, Quercus publishing and the Rugby Football Foundation.

Sir Thomas Roe: Memory, transculturality, and the incorporated self

In 1615, Sir Thomas Roe arrived at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, via a stop in Surat and an arduous journey across Gujarat and Rajasthan. His embassy would be filled with frustrations -- clashes with East India Company factors deeply protective of their own autonomy on the one hand, obstacles posed by Mughal court customs and officials on the other. He had not really achieved much when he left, and the EIC would not send another ambassador till 1699. Roe nevertheless earned a significant reputation for diplomacy in difficult terrain, and his Mughal embassy has emerged as a standard case study in theorisations of cross-cultural encounter with India, to the extent that it has begun to define our understanding of the nature of English first encounter with India.

This paper, by Prof Nandini Das, places the accounts of Roe’s very familiar Mughal embassy against the backdrop of his long career across four continents and four decades, to interrogate our understanding of the 'moment' of cross-cultural encounter. Ben Jonson makes an appearance.

Prof Nandini Das is a Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Director of the TIDE Project (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c. 1550-1700). She works on Renaissance romance, fiction and early travel and cross-cultural encounters. Other research interests include early modern cultural and intellectual history, editing theory and history of the book, Shakespeare, Renaissance theatre and popular culture, women’s writing (especially Renaissance women writers and female pseudo-autobiographies from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century), the development of early eighteenth century Orientalism, and digital humanities.

All welcome, and there will be drinks and discussion afterwards.

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, Seminar Series (Various Dates)

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges is delighted to announce that our first event of 2013 will be a special lecture by Professor Nigel Smith of Princeton University. He will speak on Literature, Politics and the Dutch Republic.

The lecture will take place at 6pm on Thurs 24th January in Christopher Ingold G21, Ramsay Lecture Theatre. All welcome. For maps and directions, please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/find-us.

Other events this term are:

Wed 6th February, Foster Court 114, 6pm: Early Modern Women and Drama
Special guest speakers: Alison Findlay (Lancaster) and Marion Wynne-Davies (Surrey).
Yasmin Arshad (UCL) and Emma Whipday (UCL) will also introduce their forthcoming production of Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra (see below).

Sun 3rd March: a performance of Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra. Further details to follow. 

This production is generously supported by the 'Gained in Translation' programme of the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction, the UCL European Institute, and FIGS (Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies, Arts and Humanities, UCL).

20th March, Foster Court 114, 4.30pm: Social, Intellectual and Political Networks and Exchanges across the Italian Peninsula (1500-1700)
Speakers: Simone Testa (British Library) and Gianfrancesco Lorenza (Royal Holloway).

For project information see The Italian Academies 1525 - 1700 and Italian Academies Database.

Catholic Aesthetics

4.30pm, Wed 21st March, Roberts Building 110, UCL

Peter Davidson (Aberdeen), Rubens's design for the 1635 'Arch of the Mint' and the Virgin of the Andes?

Lilla Grindlay (University College London), ‘“Some out of vanity will call her the Queene of heauen”: polemical representations of the Virgin Mary in early modern religious discourse’

All welcome. For maps and a useful route finder, seehttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/locations/ucl-maps/. 

For more on the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/eme/.

UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges: England and Spain

 4.30pm on Wed 9 March, in Foster Court 243 

The speakers and papers are as follows:

Alexander Samson (UCL, Spanish), Translating the Reign of Philip and Mary

John Ardila (Edinburgh), The English Reception of Don Quixote in the
Performing Arts

Catherine Scheybeler (KCL), Jorge Juan y Santacilia's mission to London:
An example of naval espionage in the eighteenth century

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges: France and England: Medieval to Early Modern

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges is delighted to invite you to a
series of seminars for the autumn term. Seminars will take place at 4.30pm
on Wednesdays in Foster Court 243. For maps and directions, please see
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/

Details are as follows:


20th October. France and England: Medieval to Early Modern

Jane Gilbert (UCL, French), France and England and Medieval Literature
Ardis Butterfield (UCL, English), Literatures of France and England
Paul Davis (UCL, English), French Influence on Restoration Drama




Information can also be found athttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/eme/Events  or by
contacting Helen Hackett (h.hackett@ucl.ac.uk) or Alexander Samson
(a.samson@ucl.ac.uk). All welcome; we hope you can join us.