Ayesha Ramachandran of Yale’s Comparative Literature department will be discussing her paper, “Between Epic & Lyric: Petrarch and Spenser Once More”. A response will be provided by Matthew Hunter, a seventh year in the English department, before we open the floor to questions. Light refreshments will be provided.
Ayesha Ramachandran is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. She focuses on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily on Europe’s relations with an expanding world. Her research and teaching spans a range of topics: the literature and cultural history of the European Renaissance; the history of science and technology (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries); cartography and literature; early modern empires and international law; and the history of philosophy. She has just completed a book-length study, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, entitled “The World-Makers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe,” which explores the reshaping of the concept “world” and its implications for theories of modernity across a range of disciplines. She has published articles on Spenser, Lucretius, Tasso, Petrarch, Montaigne and on postcolonial drama. She was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2007.