Department of English

• Monday, April 21, 2025 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135)

Please join us on Monday, April 21 at 6 pm in the FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135), where our very own Nat Rivkin will defend her dissertation, “Trans Metamorphoses: Gender, Race, and Classical Receptions.” Nat writes: 

This dissertation returns us to the archaic figures that express gender variance in late medieval and early modern literature: the monstrous birth, the virgin, the hermaphrodite, and the angel. Drawing together trans theory, premodern critical race studies, and classical reception history, I construct a long genealogy of what we now call transgender, in which racial difference is inextricable from the assignment of sex. Through close readings of Middle English romance, early drama, Ovidian myth, and biblical epic, the project argues that literary figures inherited from classical antiquity can reveal racial and historical blind spots within trans studies now: until recently, the field has largely overlooked the premodern invention of race. Lurid portraits of unsexed infants in Syria and pallid hermaphrodites in Turkey tell a far different story. Each chapter, then, concentrates on a pair of texts that align fair skin and Christian faith with culturally specific and normative genders. I stress that expansive––and even offensive––classical terms such as “monstrous birth” and “hermaphrodite” show us the inadequacy of present critical vocabularies for gender and race. By attending to these distinctly literary depictions of gender variance, the project contests the hostile myth that trans-exclusive rhetoric is at once natural and historically sanctioned. In short, “Trans Metamorphoses” challenges the popular fantasy of premodern Europe as a place where knights were knights, ladies were ladies, and everyone was white.

 The public portion of the defense (6-7 pm) will be a hybrid event. For those who cannot make it in person, please contact Nat for a Zoom link. We hope to see you there as we congratulate Nat on this wonderful achievement!