Jo Labanyi, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, will speak on “Facts and Fictions: Knowledge, Delinquency and Madness in Late 19th-century Spain” at 4 p.m. Feb. 27 in Umrath Hall Lounge.
Labanyi is the first speaker in the spring Faculty Fellows Lecture and Workshop Series sponsored by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences.
Her talk, drawing on Mary Poovey’s “A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society,” will investigate the construction of deviance in 19th-century Spanish fiction. In particular, Labanyi will explore how such texts both create and transmit knowledge about delinquency and madness and how they inform contemporary understanding of Spanish literary history.
In addition, Labanyi will lead the workshop “The Gender of Knowledge in the Late 19th Century” at 1 p.m. Feb. 28 in McMillan Café. The workshop will focus on the rigid ordering of gender in 19th-century Spain and how such ordering reflected a cultural obsession with the documentation of all forms of national life. Discussions will investigate the ways in which the marginalized, who did not fulfill the standard requirements of membership in civil society, were known both by others and to themselves.
Labanyi was invited to campus by 2007 Faculty Fellow Akiko Tsuchiya, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish in Arts & Sciences.
“She has done groundbreaking work on Spanish literature, cultural history, film and gender studies,” Tsuchiya said. “The sheer interdisciplinary breadth of her work — from 19th-century narrative to 20th-century cinema — makes her an ideal visitor for the Center for the Humanities.”
The lecture series continues at 4 p.m. March 6 in Umrath Hall Lounge with a presentation by Tsuchiya on “Consuming Subjects: Female Reading and Deviant Sexuality in Late 19th-century Spain.”
Subsequent speakers include:
• March 20: Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Ph.D., associate professor of music, University of Pennsylvania, on “Gendering Black Musical Genius,” 4 p.m. Umrath Hall Lounge; workshop on “The Blues Muse” 2 p.m. March 21, Music Classrooms Building, Room 102
• March 23: Gerald N. Izenberg, Ph.D., professor of history in Arts & Sciences, on “The Varieties of ‘We’: Collective Identities and Their Conflicts,” 12 p.m., McDonnell Hall, Room 162
• April 17: Patrick Burke, Ph.D., assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences, on “From Way Uptown: African-American Jazz Musicians and Racial Representation on Swing-era 52nd Street,” 4 p.m., Brown Hall, Room 118
• April 24: Carol J. Greenhouse, Ph.D., professor of anthropology, Princeton University, on “Life Stories, Law Stories: Legalism and Narrative in the Ethnography of the United States,” 4 p.m., Umrath Hall Lounge; workshop 11:45 a.m. April 25, Cohen Lounge, Busch Hall
All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call 935-5576 or visit cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu.