Events

Location: Kaplan 193

Event Time: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

A workshop with Professor Susan Phillips (Department of English at Northwestern) for graduate students geared towards premodernists interested in multidisciplinary research and teaching.

Professor Phillips is Alumnae of Northwestern University Teaching Professor and Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. Her book, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (Penn State 2007) explores the religious, cultural, and literary work of “idle talk” in late medieval England. Winner of two Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowships, she has published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. She is currently completing her second monograph, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England, which traces the cultural history of the dictionaries, phrasebooks, and guides to conversation that flooded the European marketplace from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. These bestsellers taught readers not only how to conjugate verbs and negotiate with foreign merchants, but also how to insult neighbors and chat up chambermaids in up to eight different languages. More than simply entertaining content, these mischievous conversations constitute a new pedagogical practice, as language learning itself underwent a translation out of the classroom, into the marketplace, and further down the social ladder.