Title: Responding to Modernity: Postsecular Approaches for Scholarship
Lecturer: Lori Branch (Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Iowa)
Chairperson: LIU Wenjin (Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 3 pm, May 11th, 2018 (Friday)
Venue: Room 3102, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Modernity brings with it both progress and problems, including secularism. In the first half of presentation, Professor Branch will overview postsecular responses to modernity that can enrich our research and scholarship. In the second half, as a scholar of literature, she will explore what a postsecular approach to modernity means for reading and teaching literature.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Lori Branch, Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Iowa. Her scholarship focuses on the British long 18th century but has ranged from the 4th-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers to the Twilight saga. Across her work, she is interested in thinking critically about secularism as an ideology and in finding fresh language to speak about religion in all its breadth and complexity as we encounter it in literature, the world today, and personal experience. Monographs: Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Christianity & Literature Book of the Year 2007); Postsecular Reason: An Anti-Manifesto (in progress).