Arts, Culture, and Ideas Lunchtime Series

Arts, Culture, and Ideas
Lunchtime Series

A New Lunchtime Discussion Series from the Boston University Humanities Foundation and the Arts & Sciences Alumni Relations Office.

Representing Old Age in Late Elizabethan Literature

Thursday, December 3
Noon

Dean’s Conference Room, Room 132
College of Arts & Sciences
685 Commonwealth Avenue

Cost: $15

register

How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whose works mark the last quarter-century of Elizabeth I’s reign (1578-1603) as one of the richest periods in all of English literature, regard and represent old age? Was late life seen as nothing more than a time of withdrawal and preparation for death, as scholars and historians have traditionally held?

Come hear Christopher Martin discuss how, contrary to received impressions, writers and thinkers of the era—working in the shadow of the kinetic, long-lived Queen herself—contested such prejudicial and dismissive social attitudes.

The program will feature lunch and dessert.
Register by Monday, November 30.

Professor Christopher Martin

After earning his doctorate at the University of Virginia in 1986, Professor Christopher Martin joined BU’s Department of English where he has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies since 1995. From 2005-2008, during his tenure as the university’s NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor, he also helped coordinate CAS’s Core Curriculum program.

Professor Martin specializes in English and continental literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as classical influences on early modern culture. His publications include Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare (which won an NEH Scholarly Publications Grant) and Ovid in English. He currently holds a Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellowship from the Boston University Humanities Foundation, to complete work on a book provisionally titled Constituting Old Age in English Renaissance Literature, from which he will draw his presentation.

Previous lectures

The Loaded Brush:
Interpreting Texture in Venetian Renaissance Painting

Professor Jodi Cranston

Thursday, June 18, 2009, 12:30 p.m.
Dean’s Conference Room, Room 132
College of Arts & Sciences, 685 Commonwealth Avenue

Renaissance painters represented the natural world as though the painting itself were a window, preserving the illusion by minimizing any indications that pictures were handmade objects. In the 16th century, however, painters in Venice began to compromise this standard by flaunting the materials and work involved in their art.

Join Jodi Cranston in considering the evolution of thick brushwork within the artistic milieu of Renaissance Venice and its influence on subsequent painters, including Rembrandt, Rubens, and Cezanne.

Professor Jodi Cranston
Professor Cranston is an associate professor and the director of undergraduate studies in the Art History department at Boston University, where she has taught for seven years. She received her B.A. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University and her Ph.D. in Art History, as well as an M.A. and M.Phil., from Columbia University.

Professor Cranston is the author of The Poetics of Portraiture in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and several articles in interdisciplinary Renaissance publications. She is currently completing a book on materiality in Titian’s later paintings. The American Council of Learned Societies has awarded her the Charles Ryskamp Fellowship.