The Couch: The Flight of Freud's "Smyrna Rug"

Announcing a Master Class in the Humanities

The Couch: The Flight of Freud's "Smyrna Rug"
Marina Warner
Thursday, Oct. 7, 5 pm
Moot Court Room, Law School
masterclassesinthehumanities.com

In each Master Class, a world-renowned scholar begins with one object and peels away layer after layer to reveal an entire world of meaning. Our first case study is Freud's couch. Our guide is Marina Warner, a writer of fiction, cultural history and criticism, specializing in mythology and fairy-tales, with an emphasis on the part women play in them. Her many award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006). She has published five novels and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, Warner is also Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Queen Mary, University of London, since 2009. She is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded a CBE in 2008.

Please note our future speakers (bios below):

• David Wellbery: Thursday, Nov. 4, 5 p.m., Georgian Room, IMU.
• T. J. Clark: Thursday, March 3, 5 p.m., Moot Court Room, Law School.
• Carlo Ginzburg: Thursday, April 14, 5 p.m. Moot Court Room, Law School.

The Master Classes lecture series accompanies the Remak New Knowledge Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study and has received generous funding from the Institute, the College Arts & Humanities Institute, the Multidisciplinary Ventures and Seminars Fund of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, and the Provost's Office, all at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Conveners: Michel Chaouli (Germanic Studies) and Dror Wahrman (History)

David Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor at the University of Chicago and holds appointments in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature and in the Committee on Social Thought. He is the author of two studies that are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s Laocoön. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason, 1984, and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism, 1996. In 2005, he was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his scholarly achievement. In 2008, Wellbery was elected a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 2009, he received a doctorate, honoris causa, from the University of Konstanz, Germany.

T. J. Clark is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair, and Professor of Art History, University of California at Berkeley. His books, which established him as one of the top handful of art historians worldwide, include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, both 1973; The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1985; Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 1999; (with Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts: under the name "Retort") Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, 2005; and The Sight of Death, 2006. In 2006 he received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art and was awarded a $1.5 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation distinguished achievement award. He recently presented the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies, emeritus, at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most famous book is The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, 1980, which cemented his reputation as the doyen of the innovative approach known as microhistory, as a leader in the historical study of popular culture, and as one of the major historians of the twentieth century. His many other books include: The Enigma of Piero della Francesca, 1985; Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, 1989; and No Island is an Island. Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective, 2000. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and the British Academy.