Reflection: Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture Featuring Nathan K. Hensley

My talk was an effort to take the measure of ideas about disaster and possibility from the past and see how we might learn from them today.- Professor Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University

Recently, Duke English hosted the third annual Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture. This year's guest lecturer was Blue Devil alum Nathan K. Hensley, who received his PhD in English from Duke University, and is  currently a professor at Georgetown University. Hensley presented a lecture titled “The Women on the Stairs: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity,” which centered around his recent book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse. 

The lecture highlighted the enduring importance of thinking and art, even — and maybe especially — when the world around you feels almost beyond repair. Hensley talked about paintings and literary art from the nineteenth century. He presented to the audience how these early thinkers felt through early premonitions that the modern world they saw developing was destined to fail at some level. 

This was such a lovely, thought-provoking talk! One of the hallmarks of Nathan Hensley's work is that while it is very much concerned with the larger arc of history, it is also very much focused on the formal ways in which literature and art think about the world. This is work that is self-reflective about the methods and techniques of literary criticism and the work that scholars do in the world that they study and of which they are also a part. Even as a grad student at Duke, his work reflected these concerns; it's so exciting to see the work he's doing now as a mature, mid-career scholar. - Professor Kathy Psomiades, Duke English

I enjoyed hearing about how Professor Hensley is devising a new way to think about the connection between action and hope-- as someone interested in the connection between visual and written forms, I was excited to learn more about how visual art and poetry from the nineteenth-century register action on the level of detail or a minor fragment.- Trisha Santanam, ’26

The emeritus Duke English professors for whom this lecture honors, Leonard Tennenhouse and Nancy Armstrong shared the following comments about Professor Hensley's lecture:

As pleased as we were by Nathan's thanks for goading him to try and rescue the century that reinvented nature from the narrow category of Victorian Studies, we were unprepared for the cheerfully disturbing argument that followed.

It's not often that even a Victorianist so well trained as Hensley will allow an audience to follow the crumbs of Victorian culture—conventionally picked, fondled, and consumed for their own sake—as he took them back and forth across the language border separating Naomi Schor's "detail" from Keller Easterling's "global infrastructure." The reward was palpable: Hensley's paper gave us a way of thinking about the relationship between suicide and hope that shows how easily self-destruction and the need for a community promote each other, all the while insisting on their status as a contradiction. This response lacks all traces of the subtlety that made Hensley's talk a compelling way of rethinking the environmental stalemate. - Emeritus Professors Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Duke English

Professor Hensley acknowledged that being selected as the third Tennenhouse-Armstrong lecturer was truly an honor for him:

It was sincerely moving to return to Duke to give this talk, and doubly emotional because the whole thing was made possible by Nancy and Len. Coming back to a place that formed you is always a powerful and slightly disorienting experience, since you're a different person now but somehow, also, still the same. That sameness-in-difference is hovering around you the whole time like a charged field of energy, crackling. This visit carried all that feeling but even more intensely. Nancy has been a mentor and supporter of mine since before I started at Duke, so returning here to address a roomful of wildly smart and interesting people about my own work was deeply special to me -- I'll never forget it. In fact, a key part of my talk was about the idea of solidarity, which is where you set aside small differences to fight alongside others for a common cause. Nancy has a beautifully pugnacious fighting spirit in exactly that way: with total commitment, she helped me, along with many of her students, to get a foothold in what can be a really inhumane and challenging corner of the world — academia. So I was holding back tears when I started to describe my feelings about the opportunity I now had, to come and speak to the Duke English Department -- a place that taught me how to think!

The day following his lecture, Professor Hensley led a lunch workshop with several Duke English graduate students.

Professor Hensley's talk was a deeply thoughtful, invigorating, and timely performance of aesthetic analysis and cultural critique. In addition to providing incisive readings that pulled wayward texts and objects to the fore, Hensley also demonstrated, in the most refreshing way, the liveliness that can—and should—inform and accompany the work we do as literary scholars. - Britt Edelen, Duke English, PhD Candidate