Events

The Smith College Department of English is pleased to host Mary Baine Campbell as the 2019–20 Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies. Campbell is professor emerita of English, comparative literature and women’s and gender studies at Brandeis University, where she founded the creative writing program with Allen Grossman. She is a scholar of medieval and early modern travel writing, utopia and science (especially anthropology and cosmography), and also teaches poetry and environmental studies.

She will give three lectures at Smith drawn from her current book in progress, Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oenirics in the Atlantic World, 1550-1750. The book asks why dreams are no longer taken seriously in daily life and community affairs, given the prevalence of “dream” in the Anthropological Index. Has “dream” as a basic human activity and source of knowledge been corralled by the workings of European colonialism into the once-subjugated societies of its empires? How did that happen, and what can the written record show us about the neglected arts of dreaming? Are we of the supposedly post-industrial world in need again of access to that skill, in the face of climate crisis? Can we find our way back?

Lecture Dates and Titles

September 24: The Renaissance of Dreams

October 22: Dreaming and Knowing: The Case of Descarte’s Dreams

November 19: Atlantic Dreaming: Vision and Prophecy in the New World

All lectures take place on Tuesdays from 4:30-6 p.m. at the Alumnae Conference Hall.

In 2019-20, the 62nd annual Engel lecture, Unfinished: William James and the Making of America’s Religious Classic, will be presented by Carol Zaleski, Professor of World Religions, on Thursday, January 30, at 5:00 pm in the Alumnae House Conference Hall, Smith College: For William James, the "right to believe” was a life-or-death matter: he attributed his recovery from suicidal depression to a decision to permit himself to believe in free will. In his Gifford Lectures, published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience, he extended this privilege to religion, providing a naturalistic but sympathetic interpretation of conversion, mystical states of consciousness, saintly affections, and prayer. Though it lacked the fully worked out philosophical conclusion James had hoped to provide, the Varieties became an instant classic, prized by figures as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Muhammad Iqbal, D. T. Suzuki, and Bill Wilson (co-founder of AA). James’s admirers praise him for his robust defense of religious experience and its life-changing power; his detractors criticize him for his emphasis on private, eccentric, and extreme mental states. But the Varieties is best understood in the way James understood himself, his philosophical system, and reality as a whole: as an unfinished project. In recounting the making of the Varieties, this talk suggests ways in which James’s oversights can be corrected, his exuberant pluralism more fully realized, and his religious classic rediscovered for today. 

The Katharine Asher Engel Lectureship at Smith College was established in 1958 by the National Council of Jewish Women to honor the memory of Mrs. Engel, its onetime president, a graduate of Smith College, 1920. Mrs. Engel's life was one of generous participation in educational, civic, religious and welfare activities. In endowing the lectureship, the council hoped to "create a bond between a remarkable woman, her college, and the organization to which she was devoted." Under the terms of the grant, the holder of the annual lectureship must be a member of the Smith College faculty who has made an outstanding contribution to knowledge in his or her field.  

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Carol Zaleski earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the study of religion from Harvard University. She has been teaching philosophy of religion, world religions and Christian thought at Smith since 1989 and was appointed to the chair in world religions in July 2006.

Zaleski is the author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times and The Life of the World to Come (both Oxford University Press). She is the co-author, with Philip Zaleski, of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Prayer: A History (Houghton Mifflin), The Book of Heaven (Oxford) and The Book of Hell (forthcoming, Oxford). She is currently working on a book about the search for immortality. She is a columnist and editor-at-large for Christian Century, and has contributed articles and reviews to The New York Times, First Things, America, Second Spring, Nova et Vetera, Communio, Parabola, The Journal of Religion and The Journal of the History of Ideas.

Zaleski regularly teaches Philosophy of Religion; Introduction to World Religions; The Inklings; The Catholic Philosophical Tradition; Heaven, Hell, and Other Worlds: the Afterlife in World Religions; and seminars on C. S. Lewis, William James and John Henry Newman.

This spring, Frédéric Ogée joins the Smith College community as the 2018-19 William Allan Neilson Professor. Ogée will deliver a series of three public lectures. Videos of the lectures will be available on the Kahn Institute website following each lecture.

Frédéric Ogée is professor of English literature and art history at Université Paris Diderot. Ogée comes to Smith most recently from the Clark Art Institute, as the Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art before the Age of Art History. His main period of research is the long 18th century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as “Better in France’? The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the 18th Century” (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006), and J.M.W. Turner, Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010). In 2006–07, he co-curated the first ever exhibition on Hogarth for the Louvre. In 2014–17 he was a member of Tate Britain’s advisory council. He is currently preparing a monograph and exhibition on Thomas Lawrence for 2019.

Lecture Dates and Titles

March 4, 2019 J.M.W. Turner, Landscape, and History
In the first in a series of three lectures dedicated to British art, Frédéric Ogée will discuss the historical and political importance of landscape in Britain’s nascent school of art at the turn of the 19^th century. Focussing on J.M.W.Turner, the lecture will look at the work of one of its leading and most path-breaking figureheads.

March 19, 2019 Performing the Self in Enlightenment England: William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne and Modern Identity
After landscape, discussed in the first lecture, this second in a series of three lectures dedicated to British art will examine the other dominating genre, portraiture, in the rise of a national school of art in England in the course of the 18th century. The Enlightenment approach of identity and self allowed the emergence of a new conception of ‘human nature’, which was reflected and questioned in the art and literature of the period.

March 25, 2019 Truth, Nature, and Nation in British Art
Rounding up a series of three lectures on British art, this final talk will take stock of the two previous lectures’ examinations of landscape and portraiture to discuss the vexing question of ‘the Englishness of English art’. Focusing on this most insular European school of art, it will raise questions about the relevance, usefulness and validity of national labels and boundaries, questions that have acquired a new urgency in the Brexit context.