Monday, Sep 11, 2023
5:30PM to 7:30PM
Humanities Quadrangle 276 | Zoom
Iberian Nights begins on September 11 with a conversation on and with Ada M. Kuskowski’s groundbreaking Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge UP, 2022). Lindsay Stern, academic, novelist, and poet, will be at the helm of this session, for which she has also proposed a creative approach to Kuskowski’s book in her Living Law. Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Laurent Mayali will join in the conversation from his expertise on customary and comparative law, addressing some important points about this groundbreaking book. Tom Johnson, historian from York University, wants to say A little thing on justice reading both the book and its internal poetry. Join us for this wonderful event on Monday, September 11th at 5pm, 320 York street, HQ 276. Only the first of 1001 Iberian Nights.
We asked our interlocutors to prepare some notes and glosses for us, to help jumpstart our conversation. These are linked below to our partner seminar, Iberian Connections.
This series is inspired by the spirit of Sheherazade, Dhuoda, Christine de Pizan, Teresa de Cartagena, the pequeñas mujeres rojas and so many others for whom the practice of literature—in many of its facets—was the matter of survival. They existed in circumstances of physical and sexual violence, of civil war, of racial discrimination, of isolation; they also lived in circumstances that cannot be properly expressed outside their own experiments with literature.
Our guests write from many directions, for many audiences, for many souls. Novels, reviews, the lives of afrodescendent people, dance, race, sexual violences, asylum briefs, and so many other forms of polyhedric writing that explore the limits of literature—and those of survival. They will be in conversation about their work, about their thought and, certainly, about the joys and frustrations of the literary worlds they inhabit. To see our full Fall schedule, please visit our Iberian Nights page..