Wall to Present Haines Lecture
Thursday, September 6, 2018
The English Department at the University of the South invites the public to the annual Haines Lecture by Wendy Wall, titled “Poet in the Making: Salvation, Matter, and Cosmology in Hester Pulter’s Works.”
Imagine a recently discovered 17th-century manuscript that interweaves anguished poetic meditations on regicide, sin, child-loss, and loneliness with the thrill of astronomical, atomic, and chemical discoveries. “In Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassas,” a previously unknown English female writer named Hester Pulter offers striking poems that mix detailed scientific knowledge with the poetic techniques refined by John Donne and George Herbert. In her poetry, Pulter capitalizes on the vivid mobility of matter to concoct her own peculiar theory of making, personhood, and salvation. What new perspectives on faith, science, and poetics do these poems reveal? How do they document modes of intellectual production previously invisible to scholars? And, how might we use 21st-century technologies to infuse Pulter’s poems with the mobility that she so valued?
Wall is a professor of English and director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. The lecture will take place at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 13, in Convocation Hall, followed by a reception.
The Haines Lecture Series is funded in memory of Stacy Allen Haines, 1919-1983.