Third Installment of Faculty Work Discussion Series This Friday With Professor Julianne Werlin
As part of this semester’s English Department Faculty Work Discussion Series, Professor Julianne Werlin will be presenting “Demographic Approaches to Early Modern Literature” this Friday, November 6th, at noon. To sign up for this discussion with Professor Werlin, please click here.
Though COVID-19 makes it impossible to gather together in person this Fall, this series allows us to gather virtually to discuss recent faculty work on literature. This discussion series is for anyone interested in the work of the department. At these discussions, the faculty member whose work is featured will provide some opening comments, followed by Q&A and open discussion. Participants will be provided with a short text to read beforehand.
This Friday’s presentation will be the third installment of the English Department Faculty Work Discussion Series during the Fall 2020 semester. Professor Werlin’s describes her upcoming discussion:
“I’d like to use this lunchtime event to describe and solicit advice about a project I’m just beginning: an attempt to set the literary history of early-modern England in demographic context by creating a prosopography of writers. Prosopography that is, collective biography, is a technique that seeks to discover and describe the characteristics of a particular group. Prosopographies can take various forms, but what I’m interested in doing in this project is tracking major life events and social categories, including life expectancy, marriage and procreation, class, birthplace and place or places of residence, religion, sex, and a few others. This project is still in the data collection phase -- itself as much a qualitative as quantitative endeavor -- which I’m working on with the invaluable help of Jane Harwell.
Because this project hasn’t yet led to any articles, I’m distributing an earlier paper, “Love Poetry and Periodization,” which sparked my interest in demographic analyses of literary history and led me to think there would be value in taking a prosopographic approach. In this paper, I make a case for interpreting changing erotic values in Renaissance love poetry about the shift in the marriage rate in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. I hope this can be the starting point for a conversation about demography and literary history, sociological approaches to the author, the problems of literary and historical categorization and category formation, and any other fundamental questions of literary scholarship we can address in 75 minutes.”
We look forward to you joining us this Friday, November 6th, 12:00 -1:15 pm for Professor Julianne Werlin’s presentation “Demographic Approaches to Early Modern Literature.” You can register here.
You can find previous episodes of this series by visiting https://english.duke.edu/faculty-work-discussion-series. The Faculty Works Discussion Series will continue during the Spring 2021 semester, beginning with a presentation by Professor Joseph Winters on January 29, 2021.
