Date/Time
Date(s) - 24 Nov 2014
3:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
Hamilton Hall, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
The Department of Italian is pleased to invite you to the following lecture
in the context of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium:
Cartographic Imagery and Continental Poetics from Petrarch to Ramusio
Katharina N. Piechocki (Harvard University)
Monday, November 24, 2014, 3pm
501 Hamilton, Columbia University
This talk takes its departure from three developments that were an integral part of Italian humanism: the rise of the Italian vernacular leading to the emergence of new literary genres; a revitalized interest in philology and translation triggered by previously unknown ancient sources; and a more scientific idea of space that emerged with both the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in Europe around 1400 and the “discovery” of new territories leading to the rise of cartography. While these developments have usually been examined separately from one another, my talk explores them as interlocking practices. Studied together, they provide a powerful lens to rethink Italian Renaissance literature within a larger intercontinental and interdisciplinary framework. Taking Petrarch’s Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1358) and the first vernacular travel anthology, Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (Venice, 1550), as a chronological framework, this talk focuses on the productive tension between literature and cartography in late 15th- and early 16th-century visual and textual material.
Katharina N. Piechocki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She holds a doctorate in Romance Languages from Vienna University (2009) for a dissertation on the origin of the opera libretto in 17th-century Italy and France. In 2013, she completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University. Her NYU dissertation is titled “Cartographic Humanism: Defining Early Modern Europe, 1390-1590.” She is currently preparing both dissertations for publication. Her most recent article, “Syphilologies: Fracastoro’s Cure and the Creation of Immunopoetics,” is forthcoming in Comparative Literature. At Harvard, Katharina is the co-chair (together with Tom Conley) of the Cartography Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Contacts:
Department of Italian
Jo Ann Cavallo, Chair
[email protected]
Pier Mattia Tommasino
[email protected]