Please join us for the 2011 Faculty Research Forum Series. The one hour forums are held from 12:30 - 1:30, and offer an excellent opportunity for the faculty to share their research interests with faculty, staff, students, and the community. Each hour long forum consists of two twenty minute presentations and a twenty minute question period.
This year we have three separate forums scheduled January 20th, 27th, and February 3. The first installment this year will be presented by Dr. Barbara Johnston, Assistant Professor of Art History and Dr. Angela Green, Assistant Professor of English
Dr. Johnston will be presenting:
The Magdalene Model: Paradigm and Parallel in Louise of Savoy’s Vie de la Magdalene.
Among female saints, Mary Magdalene is second only to the Virgin Mary as a source of inspiration for Christian women. One of the saint’s most ardent devotees was Louise of Savoy, mother of French king Francis I. In 1516 Louise commissioned François Demoulin de Rochefort to produce a manuscript depicting the life of Mary Magdalene for her personal use. In the Vie de la Magdalene, Demoulin presents the saint as the exempla of Christian love and feminine virtue. By including issues of personal concern to Louise and establishing thematic parallels between the two women, Demoulin provided his patron with a model for her own devotions made more accessible through the correspondences in their lives. This paper examines the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Louise of Savoy as presented in the Vie de la Magdalene, elucidating the saint’s role as Louise’s spiritual paradigm and feminine parallel.
Dr. Green will be presenting:
Lost In Language: Rhetorical Illiteracy in The House Of Mirth, Absalom, Absalom!, And Invisible Man
This study explores rhetorical illiteracy within the novels of three writers spanning the first half of the twentieth century. Each novel grapples with the often baffling and sometimes alienating changes that swept through American culture and forever altered the texture, pace, and complexity of life as well as the lexicon with which we describe or shape it. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), William Faulkner’sAbsalom, Absalom! (1936), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) might seem to have little in common with one another, depicting as they do such disparate experiences of American life. All three novels feature characters ill at ease in their putative “home” language and illustrate that literacy in the first half of the twentieth century was far more complex than is often assumed and not nearly so removed from the kinds demanded of present citizens of the “information age” and “knowledge economy.”
We hope that you join us for this educational and informative series. Also, please take a look at the upcoming speakers and topics.