Events

About the talk

How did missionaries, foreign diplomats, and native scholars in China make dictionaries in the nineteenth century? This talk explores lexicography as a site of cross-cultural collaboration and ideological negotiation. From Euro-American missionaries and foreign diplomats to Chinese and Manchu literati, diverse groups initiated different plurilingual lexicographic projects, but for very different reasons. 

By comparing these lexicographic projects emerged in nineteenth-century China, the talk reveals how conditions of printing technologies, political and religious ideals intertwined in shaping linguistic knowledge. It encourages us to see lexicography not as a neutral scholarly pursuit, but as an experimental field where competing ideas of plurilingualism and universality took form.

About the speaker 

Qi Hong (they/she) is a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture. Their dissertation explores the science, aesthetics, and politics of “linguistic sound” in China in the 19th and 20th centuries. Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, book history, and the history of science and technology, this dissertation aims to historicize linguistic concepts and experiments, as well as their reception within the broader intellectual community in the late Qing and Republican eras.

About the talk

How can grief and mourning reveal not only personal sorrow, but also cultural tensions around power, ritual, and the limits of human expression? Dr. Antony Augoustakis—Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois and a leading scholar of Roman epic and Flavian literature—will deliver a talk titled Death and Ritual in Statius’ Silvae. The author and editor of numerous influential books and volumes, including recent works on Silius Italicus and Statius, Dr. Augoustakis’ scholarship examines themes central to Roman cultural and literary history, with particular focus on epic and lyric poetry of the first century CE.  First established at Thorneloe University, this lecture series commemorates Dr. Sally L.D. Katary, a U of T PhD and beloved Ancient Studies & Classics professor who taught at Thorneloe for 30 years. Thanks to the philanthropic generosity of the Katary family, including daughter, Shannon Katary (Vic 0T3), this series is now offered annually at Victoria College. 

About the speaker 

Antony Augoustakis is Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (USA). He is the author of many books, among others most recently, Silius Italicus, Punica 3 (with R.J. Littlewood; Oxford, 2022); Silius Italicus’ Punica: Rome’s War with Hannibal (with N.W. Bernstein; London, 2021); Statius, Thebaid 8 (Oxford, 2016). He has also edited many volumes, among others most recently, Silius Italicus and the Tradition of the Roman Historical Epos(with M. Fucechi; Leiden, 2022); Fides in Flavian Literature (with E. Buckley and C. Stocks; Toronto 2019); Campania in the Flavian Poetic Imagination (with R.J. Littlewood; Oxford, 2019). He is at work on a number of projects including Flavian literature. 

Registration is available via Eventbrite here.

About the talk

Walt Whitman is famous for foregrounding the “I” of the self – the poetry of body and soul – and for problematizing the terms of that expression – social and individual, material and spiritual, interior and exterior. For Whitman, this self emerges as a self-in-relation: with a multitude of individuals and an expanding America, as well as with the flora, fauna, and elements of the earth. Focusing on relationality in Leaves of Grass, I re-examine the Whitmanian self-in-relation as it is generated in various calls to ecological conscience, before tracing evolving senses of self and conscience in the contemporary ecological poetry of Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Jorie Graham. Considering the affordances of poetry for expressing diverse approaches to subjectivity and ecological responsibility contributes to a broader conversation about relations with the other-than-human world, environmental crisis, and ecological conscience.

About the Speaker

Bill Kroeger (he/him) is a PhD candidate of English (including a collaborative specialization with the School of the Environment). He studies calls to ecological conscience in different literary genres – from novels and poetry to films and protest documents. Engaging with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass as origin story, science writing, ecological theory, and personal memoir, he focuses on ethics of ecology and relation in contemporary novels such as The Overstory and Barkskins, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Jorie Graham, films (both documentary and narrative), and local environmental protest literature defending U of T’s own “Back Campus.” Bill’s work with Earthsongs, a community gardening and poetry project, seeks to mix material experiences of plants, soil, and food with poetic re-imagination of earth-relations, stewardship, and, interspecies communities.