Humanities in the Village with Chris Cannon: The Oxford Chaucer

Description

February's Humanities in the Village event features Christopher Cannon, coeditor of The Oxford Chaucer, a new scholarly-yet-accessible set that combines complete coverage of Chaucer's works with reader-friendly access to individual texts. Sharon Achinstein will join as Cannon's interlocutor.

There will be an audience Q&A after the reading—all are welcome. During the event, audience members can also pick up some recommended titles from Bird in Hand and enjoy the offerings of nighttime beverages.

Christopher Cannon is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and classics at Johns Hopkins University. He was educated at Harvard and has taught previously at UCLA, Oxford (as a fellow of St. Edmund Hall), Cambridge (as a fellow of Girton College), and New York University. He works primarily on writings in Middle English from 1100 to 1500 and, in particular, on the emergence of "English literature" as a meaningful category in this period.

In her research and teaching, Sharon Achinstein has explored the intersection of literature and political communication in the early modern period, specifically focused on questions of toleration, religious dissent, and women's participation. Form and ideology are two abiding concerns. Her two monographs, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) and Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (2003) and two edited collections, Milton and Toleration (2007) and Literature, Gender and the English Revolution (1994), placed works of literature in relation to the emerging public sphere and challenges to political and religious authority. Building on her scholarship on Milton, she has queried the history of the discipline of Renaissance literary studies, exploring how the economic pressures and values of the post-war university in the U.S. shaped the study of Renaissance literature. Her most recent research faces the history of marriage toward literature, law, politics, and theology, directions pursued in work on her edition of Milton's writings on divorce (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Through this project, Achinstein's current work engages in debates over secularism, gender, sexuality, and human rights in early modernity. She is the recipient of American Council of Learned Societies and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, a Folger fellowship, and British Academy and Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowships.

This event is brought to you in partnership with The Ivy Bookshop and Bird in Hand Coffee & Books, aiming to make scholarship publicly accessible.