A Bent but Beautiful World: An Introduction

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

To launch this new series, Kathryn Temple and Michael Scott will reflect on their particular theatrical and literary interests in relation to the series’ aims and purpose. In this discussion, Kathryn Temple will introduce the series with reflections on the transdisciplinary nature of recent work on art, literature, and the environment, focusing in particular on the role studies of emotion have played in recent years. Michael Scott will consider some of the issues raised by writers from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens, illustrating how different poets through time have celebrated and used images of their environment in a variety of ways and for differing purposes. A Q&A with the audience, moderated by Kathryn Temple and Michael Scott, will follow the presentation.

Open to all. Online.

 

Speakers:

Kathryn Temple is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president at Georgetown University. Scott was on the editorial board which relaunched Critical Survey from Oxford University Press. Scott previously served as the pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

 

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk