The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800 presents two presentations by:

Carolyn Dinshaw, Chair and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Department of English, NYU, Distinguished International Visiting Fellow, Centre for the History of Emotions

ALL WELCOME

Enquiries: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

“Paradise Lost, Regained, Refracted: Saint Brendan’s Isle and the Optics of Desire”
Date: Monday 18 August, 2014
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney

The history of Saint Brendan’s Isle traces a curious history of desire. In the early medieval Navigatio sancti Brendani the Irish saint journeys over the sea towards the west, sailing for a mythical seven years but eventually finding Paradise, the Promised Land. Tudor apologist John Dee used that very voyage as evidence for Elizabeth’s I’s imperial claim to northern lands and the New World. Four early modern expeditions actually set out to find Saint Brendan’s Isle – to determine if it did indeed exist – but all ended by failing to find that Land of Promise. By the end of the eighteenth century it was concluded that this illusory landmass might well have been but atmospheric refraction – a mirage. Carolyn Dinshaw uses this history to discuss the desirous dynamics of the real and the illusory, as they are played out in journeys of exploration and empire as well as in historical research, ever beckoning and ever receding.

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin: The Green Man, Trans-Species Bodies, and Queer Worldmaking”
Date: Tuesday 19 August, 2014
Time: 1:00-2:30pm
Venue: Woolley Common Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney

The eerie figure of the foliate head, at once utterly familiar and totally weird, was a decorative motif well nigh ubiquitous in medieval church sculpture in Western Europe. This imagined mixture of human and vegetable — a head sprouting leaves or made up of vegetation — became known in the 20th century as the Green Man. It has proven to be a powerful icon of boundary crossings (sexual, racial) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the US, UK, and Commonwealth countries. This aesthetically intricate, affectively intense image represents a body that is a strange mixture, a weird amalgam: it pictures intimate trans-species relations. Carolyn Dinshaw describes foliate heads in their medieval settings and then traces the contemporary uptake of this imagery in sexual subcultures in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, focusing particularly on the traumatic contexts of HIV/AIDS and of decolonization out of which new queer worlds are being imagined.