Comparative Crossings Series Delves into "The Archive"

On Friday, December 5, the Comparative Literature program hosted the second Comparative Crossings seminar of the semester.

Idelber Avelar (Tulane University) and José Quiroga (Emory University) will present on "Sexuality and Latino/Latin American Literature and Popular Culture" at 3:30PM in the Maryland Room in Marie Mount Hall.  Dr. Avelar's current research is on "Rhythm, Race, and Nationhood in Brazilian Popular Music." Dr. Quiroga has recently published Sexualidades en Disputa and Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. The speakers will open with a fifteen-minute talk about their work and then engage in a conversation with each other and with the audience.

Comparative Crossings is in its third year of hosting leading scholars at the cutting edge of comparative literature.  These seminars engender dialogue between various voices on important topics. This semester's theme, "The Archive," examines how scholars studying the same archive of knowledge can discern important differences.

Earlier this semester Comparative Crossings kicked off its Fall series with a discussion led by two eminent scholars in the field transnational Early Modern literature. Nabil Matar, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and John Archer, Professor of English at New York University, delivered a joint-seminar entitled "Early Modern Europe and Islam." Archer and Matar discussed how Islam was viewed in Christopher Marlowe's England and how European were perceived in Ottoman North Africa.

Both Archer and Matar presented fresh research, forthcoming in important new books. Archer's research on Marlowe will appear next year in a Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture on Marlowe. Matar's latest book is called Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 (Columbia University Press, 2008).