Longtime faculty fellow of the Kroc Institute, Sandra M. Gustafson draws on key insights from the field of peace studies (including positive and negative peace, as well as direct and indirect violence) in a rich study of US literature and culture in her most recent volume, Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 (Oxford, 2023). Exploring the early peace movement, Gustafson's book charts the rise of the peace cause in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. With the Civil War as the central axis, the volume includes readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. It also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods. Each of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars. Lunch will be provided. Speakers:Sandra Gustafson, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English; Concurrent Professor, Department of American StudiesAzareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English; Concurrent Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures; Director, Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & ResistanceSpencer French, Graduate student, Department of EnglishGeorge Lopez, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of Peace StudiesOriginally published at kroc.nd.edu.

Ethnomusicologist Shayna Silverstein discusses her monograph, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria, which draws on ethnographic, archival, and digital research. She talks about how dabke—one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions—embodies the dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state.   Originally published at music.nd.edu.

Ilyon Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. She has received support for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions. Ilyon is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. Ilyon has traveled the country to speak at bookstores, museums, schools, and book festivals, and she has been featured on such programs as NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Co-sponsors: Creative Writing Program, Department of American Studies, Department of History, Program of Liberal Studies — Join the Center for Social Concerns on Friday afternoons of home football weekends for MVP Fridays: lectures by national leaders, journalists, and writers on questions of meaning, values, and purpose. Reception and book signing to follow.Learn more

© Robert Cross, 2024As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series and in celebration of International Translation Day, Professor Marco Sonzogni will deliver a lecture titled, "Is this translation?: ‘Lightenings viii’ (‘The annals say…’) and The Translations of Seamus Heaney." Lecture Abstract As a poet and translator, Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) embraced the ‘liberating idea’ that ‘an original work exists not in order to be perfect but in order to engender itself repeatedly in new translations’ (Translations of Poetry and Poetic Prose: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 110, 1999: 331). Heaney’s poem ‘1 Lightenings viii’ (Seeing Things, 1991: 62) exemplifies this idea. In this poem — known also as ‘The annals say…’ — Heaney relays to readers an extraordinary event recorded in Irish annals: the sighting of crewed ships in the sky. Reported, among other sources, in Lebor Laignech (‘Book of Leinster’), in Lebor Bretnach (Irish Nennius) and also in Konungs skuggsjá (‘The King’s Mirror’), the sighting reaches Heaney’s imagination through K.H. Jackson’s English translation, ‘The Air Ship’ (Celtic Miscellany. Translations from the Celtic Literatures, 1971: 165). In this lecture, Professor Marco Sonzogni reviews his conclusion that ‘Lightenings viii’ was an original poem and why, consequently, he did not include it in the edited collection, The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022). Rather, Sonzogni singled the poem out in his ‘Introduction’ as an example of the evolutionary impact of translation as practiced by Heaney. While Sonzogni is now uncertain that he made the right decision, he remains convinced that this text too — like all the texts collected in The Translations — bears witness to Heaney’s ‘credo’ in ‘discovering what survives translation true’ (‘Remembered Columns,’ The Spirit Level, 1996: 45). Speaker Biography Marco Sonzogni (OMRI, Officer) is an award-winning scholar, literary translator, poet, editor, and cultural activist. He is a Professor of Translation Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches evolutionary translation and intercultural communication at undergraduate and postgraduate level and directs the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation. He is the editor of the critically acclaimed The Translations of Seamus Heaney (Faber 2022 and FSG 2023). He is also the editor of the definitive edition of Seamus Heaney’s poetry in Italian translation, Poesie (Mondadori 2016). This event is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Center for Italian Studies. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Venice, BNM, Lat. Z 399, c. 98v. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice.The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Dr. Giovanna Corazza (Cà Foscari) titled:Dante’s Chorographies. From the territory to the Comedy   Between the 13th and 14th centuries, medieval Italian culture witnessed the emergence of regional and local territorial representations more prominently than in the rest of Europe. This detailed chorography, which developed both in the visual language of cartography and the verbal language of writing, evidently corresponds to the new practices of urban society, playing a central role in the conquest of rural areas and the increase in mobility, thereby engaging in a process of conceptual appropriation of space. Despite the diversity of expressive tools, the graphic and verbal chorography of the early 14th century reflect similar forms of territorial knowledge, based on an odological perspective and the need to reproduce the actual spatial and proportional relationships between the geographical objects represented. Moreover, Dante’s Comedy contains important chorography, composed in the formalized language of poetry. The analysis of these passages reveals construction methods perfectly integrated into the knowledge practices and the culture of territorial representation characteristic of his time. Giovanna Corazza è Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow presso il Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici dell’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia con il progetto GEODETIC – Geography and Cartography in Dante’s Comedy (GA 101110048), che coinvolge il Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell’Antichità dell’Università di Padova e il Center for Italian Studies della University of Notre Dame. Si interessa principalmente del rapporto tra geografia e letteratura nell’opera di Dante e nella produzione letteraria del XIV secolo, di cultura topografica e cartografica medievale, di interpretazione e ricezione dantesca.      HORIZON EUROPE Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This event is part of the MSCA Project GEODETIC – 101110048 by Giovanna CorazzaThe Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

Join the Department of Music for the first Fall Fridays at Noon concert, which features short performances by talented Department of Music students.  Originally published at music.nd.edu.