Date/Time
Date(s) - 30 Nov 2016
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
This year’s Rackin Lecture will be held on Wednesday, November 30, at 4:30PM in the Class of 1978 Pavilion at Van Pelt Library. Professor Rebecca Laroche (University of Colorado Colorado Springs) will be giving a lecture entitled “Tending the Fire: Ecofeminism, Shakespeare, and Women”. There will be no pre-circulated reading, but there WILL be a reception in the Moelis Terrace next to the Pavilion following the lecture.
The annual Phyllis Rackin Lecture honors Penn Professor Phyllis Rackin’s significant contribution to Women’s Studies as a field and her important role in supporting women’s place in the academy. Our speaker this year, Rebecca Laroche, is Professor of English at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. She has published on Shakespeare, early modern women’s writing, medical history, and ecofeminism. In 2009, her monograph Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 was published with Ashgate. She was the guest-curator of the recent exhibition “Beyond Home Remedy: Women, Medicine, and Science” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, which she co-edited with Jennifer Munroe, came out with Palgrave Macmillan at the end of 2011. She is currently working on a single-author monograph entitled Shakespeare, the Herbal, and the Intimate History of Plants and co-authoring Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, again with Je!
nnifer Munroe, for the Arden Shakespeare and Theory series. She is a founding and present member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), an international digital humanities project (emroc.hypotheses.org<http://emroc.hypotheses.org/>).
Professor Laroche writes:
In this adaptation of a chapter from a forthcoming volume co-authored with Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (Bloomsbury, February 2017), I will be examining the language around a quiet and overlooked material practice reflected in early modern recipe collections: attending to the maintenance and containment of the kitchen fire. In parsing the language from one collection, I show how a language of intimacy and reciprocity emerges and then engage this language through Stacy Alaimo’s theory of transcorporeality along with the historical fear of house fires. In turning to Shakespeare’s plays, I demonstrate how this intimacy then appears in the lines of both female and lower-sort characters, while the fear is used to fuel misogynistic structures underpinning the dramas. Ultimately, I argue for the importance of this kind of theoretical re-examination and cultural revaluation in our current age of environmental anxiety and suppressive potentials.