Dartmouth Events

"My Eighteenth Century"
Jenny Davidson, Columbia University
Wednesday, October 19, 1:00 p.m., Haldeman 041

What does it mean to read Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) in the here and the now? How do Gibbon's modes of historical knowing inform our own relationship with history and evidence? What does it mean to read Gibbon as an American specialist in eighteenth-century British literary studies? As a twenty-first-century woman? What doesn't Gibbon know -- what can't he know? And how do we begin to fill in those intellectual and personal blind spots?

Jenny Davidson is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of four novels and four books of literary criticism, including Reading Style: A Life in Sentences. Her most recent publications are an edition of Pride and Prejudice for the Norton Library and an essay on "History" for the new Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson.