Grossman Lecture: Liza Blake, "After Life in Margaret Cavendish's Vitalist Posthumanism"

Liza Blake is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

From her departmental website:

My work attends to the connections among literature, science, and philosophy in pre-modernity, early modernity, and modernity. My book project, Early Modern Literary Physics, argues that early modern authors such as Arthur Golding, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used literary techniques and forms to explore the central concepts of philosophies of nature. I argue for the coherence in the English Renaissance of the idea of physiologia, a philosophy of nature encompassing the basic makeup of the material world and the rules governing it. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed a large and varied collection of new interpretations of the physical world, and my project embraces that multiplicity. My chapters demonstrate that literary texts were just as concerned with physics as were treatises, manuals, and other recognizably scientific or proto-scientific forms of writing, and that literary studies has, accordingly, an important role to play in the histories of science and philosophy.

For more information contact: David Simon (dcsimon@umd.edu)