Carleton University’s Department of History will host the Shannon Lecture, Historical Biography and the Larger Context: The Global Outlook of Joseph Conrad, presented by Prof. Maya Jasanoff.
When: Friday, Nov. 15, 2019 at 1 p.m.
Where: Room 2017, Dunton Tower, Carleton
Info: This event is free and open to the public. A campus map is available online.
Media are invited to attend the event.
In this lecture, Jasanoff will discuss the challenges and opportunities of using life stories to write about global history by drawing on her recent work on novelist Joseph Conrad.
Conrad spent 20 years of his life as a professional sailor – traveling to Asia, Africa and the Americas. These journeys inspired many settings and characters of his later works of fiction. Literary scholars have long recognized the particular relevance of Conrad’s life story to his writing.
Jasanoff will argue that while historical research can flesh out a picture of Conrad’s life and the sources of his fiction, his life story can enrich our understanding of the time as an age of globalization.
About Maya Jasanoff
Jasanoff is Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University and winner of the 2018 Cundill Prize for The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. A former Guggenheim Fellow, her research and teaching range from the history of the British Empire to global history and historical narrative. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.
About the Shannon Lecture Series
The theme for the 2019 Shannon Lecture series is “Rebooting Biography.” Historical biographies have always been a popular avenue into the past, but with the facts about the famous and not so famous available at the tap of a keyboard, today’s historians and biographers are reshaping the genre. The conventional chronology of a life is giving way to group biographies, micro-histories and previously unheard voices. Increasingly, authors are embracing the freedom offered by digital publishing.
Lecturers will discuss the subjects of their recent biographies and the choices they made in presenting their material.
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Tuesday, November 12, 2019 in Media Advisories
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