"One of a Living Crowd," a Lecture by Rachel Eisendrath

In this talk, I will discuss my experience working at the intersection of generic boundaries (specifically, literary-historical scholarship and personal essays), reflecting on why my current work has developed toward increasingly experimental forms. My lecture will include a reading from my manuscript in-process, "One of a Living Crowd," which is nominally about New York City but ranges widely among a Montaignian range of disparate topics (insomnia and Rembrandt, Bruegel and crowds, and Shakespeare's minor characters).

Rachel Eisendrath teaches Renaissance literature and critical theory in the English Department of Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most recent book is Gallery of Clouds (New York Review Books, 2021), a creative-scholarly hybrid on reading, city life, and Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century romance, Arcadia. Her first book, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (University of Chicago Press, 2018), won the Elizabeth Dietz Award and Roma Gill Award.

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