Friday Sept 21^st, 5pm,  4202 – French Lounge

Title: RIVEREUSE: WATER, GENDER AND RESOURCE IN EARLY-MODERN FRANCE

Bio: Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and Caroline de Jager Fellow in French at Trinity College, Oxford; she has previously taught at University College London and the University of Michigan. She is the author of Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Penn, 2017) and The Style of the State in French Theater (Ashgate, 2009), and the co-editor of Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel (Yale French Studies 2013). She is currently working on a book entitled Liquid Empire, about the writing of water in France and the Americas. 

Talk: This talk explores the relationship between a figurative language about rivers and a new science of hydrology in early modern France and the French Americas. How did the residents of riverbanks – from nymphs to washerwomen – navigate the significance of the river and its multiple resources?  

Co-Sponsors: French, Renaissance Studies, History and Comparative Literature