The Department of English
And The College of Arts and Sciences |
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Presents |
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Rhetorics of Plague:
Early / Modern Trajectories of Biohazard |
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The threat of biological catastrophe—including that by AIDS, ebola,avianinfluenza,andspecies extinction—may seem the specific and daunting provenance of late 20th- and early 21st –century life, but it has in fact been a crucial part of history since ancient times. It is important to remember, for instance, that starting in the 14th century and extending well into the 18th, the bubonic plague (as the Black Death) ultimately took the lives of at least 35% of the entire population in Europe, as well as nearly that much in central Asia, killing an estimated total of 75 million people. Given these numbers, it could be argued that premodern and early modern cultures had even more at stake in articulating the role of plague—not to mention the related phenomena of cholera, syphilis, small pox, the so-called English Sweating Sickness, or extensive urban infestations, which are only a few of the shockwaves that preceded our own anxiety about spectacular biological disaster. This symposium therefore proposes rethinking the connections among recent models, representations, or biocultures of biological threat and their counterparts in the pre- and early modern eras.
A focus on the “rhetorics” of plague highlights the ways in which biological danger becomes conceptually organized, ethically ordered, or socio-politically oriented by the discourses that represent it. It also underscores the crossing or hybridization of discourses, such as the ways in which early views of medical pandemic, in the absence of a theory of germ contagion, could be linked to models of ecological or environmental dysfunction, or the manner in which disease of the body natural could metaphorize the maladies of the body politic. Furthermore, in addition to accounting for the interrelated scientific, literary, or philosophical conventions invoked by such discourses, it is important to acknowledge that, like the biological volatility they describe, discourses about plague can undergo their own kind of exponential proliferation, producing a potential plague of rhetorics. While such discourses may have predominantly originated in the metropolitan centers of Europe, there is also the need to account for their transformation or mutation when applied in non-Western or colonial contexts, as well as for the emergence of counter-discourses from non-European sources—such as China or the Middle East—that may have challenged European models of pandemic explanation, particularly as they have undergirded imperial ambitions.
Topics to be considered at the symposium include:
- How recent logics of epidemic, trauma, virology, or retrovirology find application
- to or analogues in earlier historical patterns or discourses; how recent logics continue to rely on and/or transform older models of plague, contamination, or disease.
- The aesthetics of infection; the poetics of contagion.
- The multiplicity of diseases as generator for “plagues of rhetoric”—uncontrolled proliferation of competing definitions, descriptions, or discourses; or, in turn, the disseminating tendencies of scientific discourse as an engine for an exponential explosion of apparent symptoms, biological entities, ecological effects.
- The investment of medical or ecological models of pandemic thinking in juridical, legal, political, literary, social, educational, or other pre- and early modern domains.
- The role of pandemic rhetoric in the management of early modern colonial enterprise or imperial conquest; the relevance of similar biological discourses in postcolonial or recently globalized contexts.
- The function of counter-discourses of pandemic that emerged from non-Western sources—China, the Middle East, the South Pacific, etc.—in response to European scientific, political, or colonial efforts.
- The insertion of theological, political, or sociological methodologies into scientific efforts to diagnose massive medical or ecological dysfunction.
- Philosophy and/as pandemic.
- The animal—e.g., the bird or rodent—as liminal figure of pandemic transportation or translation: as biological “other” and/or as ambiguous representative of anthropomorphized nature.
- The transformation of authoritative theological or moral paradigms by emerging scientific analyses of pandemic or contagion.
- The scientific empiricism of spiritual/moral depravity; the spiritualization of scientifically observed biological threat.
- The literature of pandemic (e.g., Bocaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year); the literary as pandemic (e.g., romance, the novel, “scribbling women,” Gothicism).
- “Modernity”—pre-, early, or post- —as vital historical threshold or suspect analytical crux for narrating the development of plague rhetorics.
- The interpenetration of biology and culture—termed “bioculture” in a recent special issue of New Literary History (38.3 [Summer 2007])—as a peculiarly postmodern feature of biological threat, or an emergent pattern in pre- and early modern contexts.
Registration
Given a relatively limited budget, we ask a nominal registration fee of $10 for all participants who are not students or associated with the University at Albany. Attendees may pay upon arrival.
Keynote Speakers
Kathleen Biddick, Temple University
Professor Biddick is a scholar of the medieval history of technology, gender, agriculture, and ethnicity. She has received awards from Mellon, NEH, Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation. Her publications include The Typological Imaginary:Circumcision, Technology, and History (U of Pennsylvania P, 2003); The Shock of Medievalism (Duke UP, 1998); The Other Economy: Pastoral Husbandry and on a Medieval Estate (U of California P, 1989); and essays in Rethinking History, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, American Historical Review, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Genders
Lecture:"The Plague of the Sovereigns and the Return of the Leviathan”(.doc)
Graham Hammill, University at Buffalo
Professor Hammill is a scholar of 17th-century British studies, with particular interests in early modern biology, political theology, and the visual arts. His publications include Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon (UP of Chicago, 2000); and essays in journals such as English Literary History, Spenser Studies, Religion and Literature, and Renaissance Drama.
Lecture:“Miracles and Plagues: Plague Discourse as Political Thought” (.doc)
John Kelly, Visiting Writer
John Kelly is an author and independent scholar, currently specializing in the intersection of history with health, human behavior, and science; the latter three areas have been his previous specialties as an author of ten books and as a journalist on health, medicine, and human development. His publications include The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (HarperCollins, 2005), which has been widely acclaimed in reviews in the U.S. Kelly’s next book, currently titled The Graves Were Walking: The Great Irish Famine and the Failure of British Natio-Building, is under contract with Henry Holt.
Lecture:“The Great Mortality, or, The Architecture of Human Disaster” (.doc)
Robert Markley, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Professor Markley has an international reputation in sciences, early modern literature, and 18th-century and more contemporary culture. He has received awards from NEH and Huntington Library. His publications include The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge UP 2005); Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Duke UP, 2005); Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (ed.) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740 (Cornell UP, 1993).
Lecture:“ ‘A Putridness in the Air’: Bioregionalism, Climate, and the Etiology of Disease” (.doc)
Symposium Program (Download PDF) (Download Conference Poster)
Thursday, February 26 |
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| 9:30-10:00 a.m | Dean’s Welcome and Opening Remarks |
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| 10:00-11:00 a.m. | Side Effects: Subjects and Co-(i)mmunities |
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Ernest Gilman (New York University), “The Subject of the Plague” |
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Jennifer Rust (Saint Louis University), “Autoimmunity and Post-Reformation Trauma in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” |
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| 11:15-12:30 p.m. | Transnational Biohazards |
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Russell Hopley (Bowdoin College), “The Plague in Islamic Lands: Juristic Responses from Andalusia and North Africa” |
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Jennifer Greiman (University at Albany), “The Atlantic Stench: Corruption, Contagion, and Empire” |
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Dana Lawton-Balejko (University at Albany), “The Ruins of Biohazard: Terrorism in Keats’s ‘The Fall of Hyperion’” |
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| 12:30-1:30 p.m. | Lunch | |||
| 1:30-2:45 p.m. | Infectious Aesthetics: Image and Lyric |
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Rolf Dreier (Erasmus University Rotterdam), “The Dance of Death: A Companion of the Plague?” |
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Lucas Hardy (University at Albany), “Anne Bradstreet’s Lyrical Illness: Disease, Poetry, and Hazardous Biomedical Consciousness” |
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| 3:00 -4:15 p.m. | Economies of Plague |
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Mike Jackson (Bonaventure University), “Daniel Defoe’s Economic Writings and the Ecology of Bacterial and Economic Infection” |
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Stephanie Boluk (University of Florida), “Media, Capitalism, and Infection (Part 1): The Rise of Print Culture in Early Modern London” |
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Wylie Lenz (University of Florida), “Media, Capitalism, and Infection (Part 2): Apocalyptic London on Film and Video” |
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| 4:30-6:00 p.m. | The Hugh Maclean Memorial Lecture |
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Graham Hammill (University of Buffalo), “Miracles and Plagues: Plague Discourse as Political Thought” |
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| 6:00-7:45 p.m. | Reception and Dinner |
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| 8:00-9:30 p.m. | John Kelly, “The Great Mortality, or, The Architecture of Human Disaster” |
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Friday, February 27 |
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| 9:00-10:15 a.m. | Enviro-Contagions |
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Lucinda Cole (University of Southern Maine), “‘I’ll Do, I’ll Do, and I’ll Do’: Witches, Rats, Food, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion” |
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Sharon DeWitte (University at Albany), “Mortality Patterns of the 14th-Century Black Death: The Skeletal Evidence” |
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Joshua Bartlett (University at Albany), “‘Unless Thou Quickly Change’: Environmental Catastrophe in the Poems of Michael Wigglesworth—A Transhistorical Reading” |
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| 10:30-12:00 p.m. | Kathleen Biddick (Temple University), "The Plague of the Sovereigns and the Return of the Leviathan” |
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| 12:00-12:30 p.m. | Lunch | |||
| 12:30-1:30 p.m. | “Contaminations”—A Performance Piece | |||
Contributors (from University at Albany): Pierre Joris, Tomás Urayoán Noel, Michael Peters, Chris Rizzo, Jackie Roberts |
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| 1:45-3:00 p.m. | Disaster Management |
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Tal Arbel (Harvard University), “The Properest Means: Preparing for Disaster in Early 18th-Century England” |
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Richard Barr (Roche Pharmaceuticals), “Blight of the Living Dead: Unmasking the Virus in Pandemics Past and Pending” |
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Kevin Siena (Trent University), “Jail Fever, Class, and the Enlightenment Memory of Plague” |
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| 3:15-4:45 p.m. | Robert Markley (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign),“ ‘A Putridness in the Air’: Bioregionalism, Climate, and the Etiology of Disease” |
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| 5:00-6:30 p.m. | Plague-Talk: A Wrap-Up Roundtable |
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Kathleen Biddick (Temple University) |
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"Rhetorics of Plague" is sponsored by:
Department of Anthropology
The College of Arts and Sciences
Department of English
Department of Theatre
Department of Women's Studies
Office of Research
The Hugh Maclean Memorial Fund
The Humanities Initiative
The New York State Writers Institute
University Auxiliary Services
Local Information
Travel
Albany is readily reached via plane, train, bus, or car. The Albany International Airport (ALB) is served by most major airlines, including American, United, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, and US Airways. Amtrak trains go to Albany from the directions of New York City, Boston, Buffalo, and Montreal several times a day. By car, Albany is at the intersection of two interstate highways, I87 and I90. More information can be found at the UAlbany website: http://www.albany.edu/about_visiting_maps.php.
Lodging
We have arranged for a special rate at the Hilton Garden Inn/SUNY Area (Ph: 518-453-1300). This rate ($111 Wednesday, $99 Thursday and Friday nights) includes a continental breakfast (note: the normal rate is $159 w/o breakfast). You may register at this rate until Thursday, February 5. Be sure to mention the "Rhetorics of Plague" symposium. For those who wish to consider other options, a listing of hotels can be found at http://www.albany.edu/admissions/accommodations.php.
Symposium Location
The Standish Room is on the third floor of the Science Library, which is behind the Campus Center. Please see the campus map below.
Parking: The two visitor parking lots (colored in bright green on the campus map: see below) closest to the Sciences Library are: the lot next to the Life Sciences building (marked P-2 on the map), toward the east end of the campus, and the lot just off of Collins Circle (P-1), which is just off Washington Avenue.
Restaurants
Restaurants with a range of cuisine and prices can be found on Western Avenue and the Stuyvesant Plaza near the campus. Additional dining options can be found on the city of Albany's website.
Contact Information
Professor Richard Barney, Department of English
Professor Helene Scheck, Department of EnglishDepartment of English
University at Albany, SUNY
Humanities 333
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222Phone: 518.442.4056
Fax: 518/442-4599
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