"The Fall of a Sparrow," 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 work in-progress, “The Fall of a Sparrow,” which is a mostly nonfiction essay that draws on Shakespeare (especially Hamlet) to consider, most broadly, the role of literary history in a country that often disavows its own history.

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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