Guest Lecturers for Spring 2008 Laurence M. Porter
Laurence M. Porter is Professor Emeritus of French at Michigan State University.  His lecture is entitled "The Paradoxes of Fictional Un-creations: Erasing the Protagonist in Modern Literature."

Laurence M. Porter lecture: Thursday, April 3, 2008 4:00-5:30 PM, English Room, Kansas Union Lecture will be followed by a reception.

 

Guest Lecturers for Fall 2007

Barbara C. Bowen

Barbara C. Bowen is Professor Emerita of French at Vanderbilt University.  Her lecture is entitled Renaissance Wit: Verbal, Visual, Edible

Barbara C. Bowen lecture: Tuesday, October 2, 2007 3:30-5:00 PM, Hall Center for the Humanities Conference Hall Lecture will be followed by a reception. In a university career spanning nearly 40 years, Dr. Bowen taught most of the undergraduate French language courses in her department, as well as literature surveys, the literature of the Renaissance, and the 20th-century comic book. On the graduate level, she taught research methodology, history of the French language, and Rabelais and Montaigne. She also taught Humanities and Comparative Literature courses when opportunity offered, and once (when the department was really desperate) taught Italian 101. Her research specialty is the French Renaissance, but like most Renaissance enthusiasts she has branched out into Neo-Latin, Italian, German, intellectual history and art history. Her research topics have included comic theater, Renaissance jokes (facetiae), emblems, scatological rhetoric, Rabelais, Montaigne, numerous other 16th-century writers, and pictorial versions of the goddess Venus with her shell. Of her five major books, she prefers the two most recent, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (1998), and Humour and Humanism (2004), an anthology of her articles.  She has edited French farces, Renaissance jokes, two homage volumes and one collection of conference proceedings. Barbara C. Bowen is hosted in association with the Hall Center for the Humanities Early Modern Seminar Series.