Free public lectures by Vice-Chancellor's Distinguished Visitors

The University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts is this month hosting four Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Visitors who will each deliver a free, one hour public lecture.

The Distinguished Visitors’ public lectures will be held at The University of Auckland’s Lecture Theatre 220, Arts 1. (Entrance between 14 and 16 Symonds Street, the corner of Symonds and Grafton or from the Business School car park across the forecourt to the Drama Studio). Bookings are not required.

Rousseau and Reading in the French Revolution
Tuesday 17 July, from 7pm
Peder Sather Professor of History, Carla Hesse, from the University of California, Berkeley, will give a lecture on Rousseau and Reading in the French Revolution.  Professor Hesse is a leading cultural historian of 18th century France and the French Revolution. Her publications have explored topics such as revolutionary print culture, gendered authorship and the cultural work of law.

Reading Nuns in East Anglia: The Legendary of Female Saints in CUL, Add. MS 2604 and its Backstory
Wednesday 18 July, from 6pm
Professor Virginia Blanton from the University of Missouri – Kansas City, will give a lecture on Reading Nuns in East Anglia: The Legendary of Female Saints in CUL, Add. MS 2604 and its Backstory. Professor Blanton’s research focuses on medieval hagiography and religious ritual, as well as on the representations of women in religious culture.

The work of the dead
Thursday 19 July, from 7pm
Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor Thomas W.Laquer from the University of California, Berkeley, will give a talk that is part of a forthcoming book examining the relationship between death and modernity. This project is motivated by a question that lies at the core of what it is to be human: ‘what work do the dead do in making civilsation?’

‘How long is it to Lammas-tide?: Circumstances in Romeo and Juliet
Thursday 26 July, from 6.30pm
2012 Alice Griffin Shakespeare Fellow, Professor Lorna Hutson, from the University of St Andrew’s, will discuss ‘How long is it to Lammas-tide?: Circumstances in Romeo and Juliet. Professor Hutson’s interests are in the rhetorical bases of Renaissance literature and in the relationship between literary form and the formal aspects of non-literary culture.

Recordings of each of the Distinguished Visitors’ public lectures will be available on The University of Auckland website in late July.