EVENT DETAILS

Trust and Risk in Literature

Meeting of international research group on trust and risk.

PI: Professor Joseph Sterrett, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Funded by the Danish government. Most sessions will be open to the campus.

“Risk: Spiritual and Financial Assurance”

This meeting will take as its focus the work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck on risk and society. While much of the importance of their work focuses on ‘manufactured’ risks brought about by modernity and has immediate usefulness in environmental criticism, one objective will be to extend their thinking about ‘risk societies’ into the early modern. Linguistically and intellectually, how did risk, a notion that came to denote a sense of quantifiable hazard, overtake or modify the notion of trust during the seventeenth century? How do the two terms function today (Giddens and Beck both frequently use the terms in a correlative way) and how have contemporary writers represented the ‘risk society’ in their work? How have writers from different periods represented the flow of money and the opportunities or dangers it presents?

Session 1: Friday 5th May, 10.00-11.30
Line Cottegnies (Professor of British literature, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3)
Title: Risky business in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
Helen Wilcox (Professor at the School of English Literature, Bangor University)
Title: Aphra Behn and the Risks of Love and War
GJV Prasad (Professor, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Title: Risk in(g) Touchability: Dalits and Change in the Feudal System (A Reading of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable).

Session 2: Friday 5th May, 1:00-2:30
Emily Shortslef (Assistant Professor. Department of English. University of Kentucky)
Title: Nothing Ventured: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Riskiness of Trust

Beth Cortese (PhD Student and Associate Lecturer. Department of English Literature and Creative Writing. County College. Lancaster University)
Title: Love at a Loss? Gambling and risk in long eighteenth century marriage comedies.

Arman Teymouri Niknam (PhD candidate, Department of English, Aarhus University)
Title: “To put the risk of life into the balance with the chance of freedom”: Trust, intimacy, and tension, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman

Session 3: Friday 5th May, 2.30-3-30
Angus Vine (Lecturer. English Studies. University of Stirling)
Title: Taking Note and the Technologies of Trust in Volpone.

Liam Hayden (Research Associate, School of History, University of Kent)
Title: Trust and Risk: “Who will trust a corporation?”

Session 4: Saturday 6th May, 10.00-11.30
Ted Motohashi (Professor, Tokyo University of Economics)
Title: Our Perdita is found: Loss and Restoration of Trust in 'The Winter's Tale'.

Julia Reinhard Lupton (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine).
Title: Trust in Theater

Joseph Sterrett (Associate Professor, Department of English, Aarhus University).
Title: ‘Let him speak no more’: Trust, Censorship, and Early Modern Anti-Confession

Session 5: Saturday 6th May, 1.00-2.30
Alison Findlay (Professor. Chair of The British Shakespeare Association. Department of English & Creative Writing. Lancaster University)
Title: Risking the Self: Comic Possibilities and Tragic Consequences

Elly McCausland (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of English, Aarhus University)
Title: ‘Into the great profound beyond’: liminal masculinities and the dramatization of risk in late nineteenth-century boys’ adventure novels

Chloe Preedy (Lecturer in Shakespeare & Renaissance Literature. University of Exeter)
Title: A Theatrical Fug: The Risks of Air Pollution, From the Early Modern to Modernity

Session 6: Sunday 7th May, 9:30-10:30
Erik Ankerberg (Professor of English)
Sverre Raffnsøe (Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School)

Roundtable: 11:00-12:00

Contact: Julia Lupton, jrlupton@uci.edu.