Food for Thought: A series of public events featuring research and creative projects by recent CAS Associates and Fellows.
We are delighted to showcase the work of some of our most productive and creative faculty in this informal series of intellectually and spiritually invigorating presentations. You are invited to drop in when you can to learn about the exciting projects undertaken by our faculty.
11:00am-11:45am: John Levi Barnard, CAS Associate 2023-24, Comparative & World Literature; English
The Edible and the Endangered
This talk will trace the development of two seemingly oppositional trends in the modern history of human-animal relations: on the one hand the rise of an environmentalism concerned with the preservation of endangered species; and on the other the rise of an industrial animal food system—from early American fisheries to the industrial slaughterhouses of the twentieth century and beyond—that is the primary cause of extinction and endangerment in the first place.
Noon-12:45pm: Lindsay Rose Russell, CAS Associate 2023-24, English
Queens, Queers, and Dictionaries
Dictionaries have a complicated relationship with sex. Big dictionaries like Merriam-Webster tend to be coy about the topic, omitting, obscuring, and stigmatizing words to do with sexed parts, persons, and acts. Smaller, weirder dictionaries have been more inventive and promiscuous, openly, even playfully, addressing sex and sexuality. This talk explores the history of sex and lexicography, from early bilingual glossaries made for queens married off to lands of another language to much later lexicons documenting the vivacious vernaculars of queer life.