P. T. Barnum’s white elephant Toung Taloung, featured in an extra supplement to the Illustrated London News, January 26th 1884 / Wikimedia Commons Feuding impresarios, a white-but-not-white-enough elephant, and racist ads for soap — Ross Bullen on how a bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race, and inadvertently[…]
San Fernando Valley Credit: Oakshade, Wikimedia Commons By Dr. David A. Wacks / 05.24.2017 Professor of Spanish Department of Romance Languages University of Oregon I wrote about the influence of Jewish exegesis in the development of fictionality, that is, those aspects of prose fiction that serve to enhance the as-if function of fiction and make possible the suspension of disbelief required[…]
Gebhard Fugel, ‘An den Wassern Babylons.’ Gebhard Fugel [Public domain] By Dr. David W. Stowe / 07.27.2017 Professor of English and Religious Studies Michigan State University At sundown on July 31, Jews around the world will observe Tisha B’av, the most somber of Jewish holidays. It commemorates the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem, first by[…]
Hundreds of new images from Thoreau’s collection of plant specimens will be available for viewing online. “I think it’s fair to say that the data that live inside these cabinets has been dark for far too long,” said Charles Davis (pictured), director of the Harvard University Herbaria. / Jon Chase, Harvard Staff Photographer By Alvin Powell[…]
A Houghton Library exhibit contains ephemera related to poet and scholar Henry David Thoreau, such as this annotated 1854 copy of “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” owned by a friend of Thoreau. / Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard Staff Photographer As the bicentennial of his birth nears, it’s clear the College influenced him more than he’d have[…]
Abandoned homes in Pripyat, 2km from Chernobyl. / Photo by Dana Sacchetti, IAEA Imagebank By Dr. David Farrier / 10.31.2016 Senior Lecturer in English University of Edinburgh Late one summer night in 1949, the British archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock[…]
Kumeyaay coiled basket, woven by Celestine Lachapa, 19th century / Photo by Durova (Wikimedia Commons), San Diego Museum of Man By Dr. Margaret Field / 12.19.2013 Professor of American Indian Studies San Diego State University The Kumeyaay Community of Baja California Anthony Pico, PhD, tribal chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, speaking at[…]
Woodcut of the morse from Olaus Magnus’ Historiae de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1558 edition) / archive.org Amongst the assorted curiosities described in Olaus Magnus’ 1555 tome on Nordic life was the morse — a hirsuite, fearsome walrus-like beast, that was said to snooze upon cliffs while hanging by its teeth. Natalie Lawrence explores the career of[…]
From Herman Melville’s Moby Dick / Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Jenny Davidson / 08.22.2016 Professor of English and Comparative Literature Columbia University A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and[…]
Photo by Ken Howard By Dr. Eric A. Gordon / 06.01.2017 Almost a decade ago I had tickets to this opera. Following up on the Minnesota Opera premiere in 2007, Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa, Orange County, Calif., announced it and I hurried to purchase tickets. Then, in the wake of the 2008 Recession, Opera[…]
Restored ruins of the Temple of Hera, ancient Doric Greek temple at Olympia, Greece / Photo by Carole Raddato, Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Seemee Ali Associate Professor of English Carthage College Hera is the most under-appreciated deity in the pantheon of Homer’s Iliad. Inseminating mortals with thoughts and understanding the secret plans of Zeus, Hera[…]
Lecture by Dr. Belinda Jack at the Museum of London / 04.11.2017 Professor of Modern Languages Christ Church, University of Oxford We have been listening to a selection of piano music by George Gershwin whose creative period overlapped with Robert Frost’s, although Gershwin, unlike Frost, died young. Why have I chosen to speak about Frost[…]
The Tower of Hercules overview / Wikimedia Commons One of the most popular of Greek heroes, Hercules (“Herakles”) was celebrated in stories, sculptures, paintings, and even in the geography of the ancient world. Perseus Project Classics Department Tufts University The Life and Times of Hercules Stories about the gods, called myths, were made up thousands[…]
Statue of Thomas Jefferson / Photo by Gage Skidmore, Flickr, Creative Commons By Dr. Ruth Finnegan Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences The Open University Prelude: A Dip in Quoting’s Ocean As I sit upstairs at my desk thinking about quoting, a series of repeated chunks of language and evocations of voices become visible and audible[…]
“Rig in Great-grandfather’s Cottage”, by W. G. Collingwood, 1908 / Public Domain By Kimberly Lin / 03.21.2017 Historian Introduction Edda is a term used to describe two Icelandic manuscripts that were copied down and compiled in the 13th century CE. Together they are the main sources of Norse mythology and skaldic poetry that relate the[…]
By Dr. Gregory Nagy / 03.13.2015 Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature Professor of Comparative Literature Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies Harvard University Classical Inquiries Center for Hellenic Studies Helen and Menelaus on a vase / Louvre Museum, Paris When I say etymology here, I mean the procedure of reconstructing a form[…]
The Old Drunkard, Hellenistic Sculpture, Late 3rd century BCE / Glyptothek, Munich By Dr. Peter Kruschwitz / 08.14.2015 From The Petrified Muse Professor of Classics Fellow of the Pontifical Academy for Latin (Pontificia Academia Latinitatis) University of Reading The Roman fabulist Phaedrus opens the third book of his Fabulae with the following piece (Phaedr. 3.1,[…]
Augusto de Campos’s Lygia Fingers, a poem from 1953 for his wife-to-be, Lygia Azeredo, highlights the international tendencies of concrete poetry; it appeared in a portfolio of concrete poems by European and Brazilian artists issued by the German printer and publisher Hansjörg Mayer in 1964. From 13 visuelle Texte (Stuttgart: Edition H. Mayer, 1964). The[…]
Sinclair Lewis at the wheel of his automobile, ca. 1920s / Yale University Library Some three decades before Kerouac and friends hit the road, Sinclair Lewis published Free Air, one of the very first novels about an automobile-powered road trip across the United States. Steven Michels looks at the particular vision of freedom espoused in[…]
Sculptural Group of a Seated Poet (possibly Orpheus) with Two Sirens, 350–300 B.C., Greek, made in Tarentum, South Italy. Terracotta with traces of polychromy. Sirens: 55 1/8 in. high. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 76.AD.11. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program Is the greatness of poetry behind us? Writer Gabriele Tinti shares[…]
Cartoon of a galvanized corpse from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division. 10.15.2016 George Forster was hanged at Newgate Prison on January 18, 1803 for murdering his wife and daughter. After the execution, Forster’s (also spelled Foster in The Newgate Calendar) body was carried to a nearby house so that Giovanni Aldini (April[…]
London Fog / From James Buntag, Twitter Lecture by Dr. Christine Corton at the Museum of London / 06.27.2016 Wolfson College Cambridge University John Ruskin, photo by William Downey, 1863 / Wikimedia Commons The art critic and historian John Ruskin (1819-1900) observed in his old age that “had the weather when I was young been[…]
Dadupanthi Saints / Photo from University of Oxford By Dr. Monika Horstmann / 10.01.2015 Professor of Linguistics University of Heidelberg “The Example in Dadupanthi Homiletics,”[1], from Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India Introduction India is rife with preaching. There is no city, no village where there are not on generous display[…]
Portrait of Sir Walter Scott, novelist and poet Walter Scott’s phenomenally popular novels and poems created an image of Scotland as a land of sublime scenery and heroic chivalry. Why is it Scott’s version rather than any of the many other nineteenth-century literary representations of Scotland that has endured in the popular imagination? Scott’s romanticised[…]
Portrait of William Shakespeare 1564-1616. Chromolithography after Hombres y Mujeres celebres 1877 / Barcelona Museum Lecture by Dr. Michael Rowan-Robinson, Museum of London / 11.30.2016 Emeritus Professor of Astronomy Gresham College ‘Shakespeare’s allusions to the planets are very often made astrologically. In but few instances are they made from a purely astronomical point of view’[…]
Replica of the Gokstad Viking ship complete with the Stars and Stripes proudly flying, featured at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 / Library of Congress A bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America. By Dr. Yvonne Seal / 02.08.2017 Assistant Professor[…]
17th Century Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer / National Portrait Gallery, London By Dr. Michael Delahoyde / 10.05.2012 Professor of English Washington State University Historical Context Introduction Most of us first encounter Chaucer near the beginning of senior year in high school. At the time I was issued my brick-red copy of Adventures in English Literature,[…]
Dante meets Beatrice at Ponte Santa Trinità, inspired by La Vita Nuova (Beatrice is in white). By Henry Holiday, 1883 / Walker Art Gallery This lecture is devoted to the Vita nuova, Dante’s autobiographical account of his “double apprenticeship” in poetry and love. The poet’s love for Beatrice is explored as the catalyst for his search[…]
Frosty temperatures at Vindolanda in winter 2014. / Photo by the Vindolanda Trust, Creative Commons By Dr. Peter Kruschwitz / 05.08.2014 From The Petrified Muse Professor of Classics Fellow of the Pontifical Academy for Latin (Pontificia Academia Latinitatis) University of Reading An inscription which has long fired my imagination is a fragmentary piece from Habitancum/Risingham[…]
Celtic Invasions / University of Oregon, Creative Commons Lecture by Dr. David A. Wacks / 10.30.2013 Professor of Spanish Department of Romance Languages University of Oregon I am going to talk about the role of literature in cultural exchange in one interesting —but not unique— cultural moment in a part of the world that was[…]