Department of English

• Wednesday, April 2, 2025 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: Zoom

For this year's Rackin Lecture we welcome the University of California, Santa Barbara's Dr. Bernadette Andrea! We will be meeting on Zoom this upcoming Wednesday, April 2nd, at 4:30 pm est.

Dr. Andrea's talk is entitled Writing Back to Orientalist Harems: From Mary Wortley Montagu to Fatema Mernissi. She writes:"Addressing the multivalent interactions between “the West” and “the Islamic World” rooted in the early modern period (1500–1800), with particular attention to women’s cultural agency, this talk delves into the history of the Arabic word “ḥarām” as it was introduced into the English language and reconfigured as “the harem” to support the emergent Anglocentric discourse of empire. It divides into three parts: the first focuses on context and method via Edward Said’s “Return to Philology”; the second analyzes the word “harem” and how it was adopted into the English language during the early modern period leading to the interventions of Mary Wortley Montagu in the eighteenth century; and the third examines Fatema Mernissi’s Islamic feminist remediations in Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems to open up a conversation about transcultural and transtemporal approaches to early modern women and gender."

Bernadette Andrea is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies and the Department of Feminist Studies. She is the author of The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007). Her edited books include Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (2019); English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (2012); and Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (2011). She has served as an editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2017–2024) and as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2022–2023).

Please contact Ariel Bates for Zoom information.