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UF Synergies: Rethinking Marginal Identities
January 27, 2020 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Free
The UF Synergies series features informal talks by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere’s Rothman Faculty Summer Fellows, Tedder Doctoral Fellows, and Rothman Doctoral Fellows. Fellows will speak for 20 minutes in length about their funded work, leaving ample time for questions and discussion. Talks are paired across disciplinary boundaries to stimulate discussions about threads and connections across research areas and allow for synergies of ideas to emerge in interdisciplinary conversations.
Dr. Nina Caputo (History) “A Jew in the Margins: Some Reflections Jewish Conversion to Christianity in the Middle Ages”
Dr. Nina Caputo focuses on Medieval conversion with the example of Petrus Alfonsi, who converted from Judaism to Christianity in the early 12th century and quickly rose to a position of significance in Iberia and beyond. Shortly after converting, he penned Dialogi contra iudaeos, a dialog between Petrus and his pre-conversion Jewish self, Moses. This text played a role in shaping Christian views of Judaism, conversion, Islam, and science among monastic readers. Using this text as a point of departure, this project explores Jewish and Christian responses to conversion.
Dr. Delia Steverson (English) “Race, Disability, and Labor in the Jim Crow South”
By using archival research from the late African American author, Delores Phillips, Dr. Delia Steverson’s presentation examines the myriad ways that African American authors conceptualize black identity in their works through disability rhetorics. Focusing on Phillips’ biography and her unpublished works, Dr. Steverson’s presentation will first introduce Phillips, of whom little is known. Secondly, Dr. Steverson will offer a commentary on the intersections of race, disability, and labor in the Jim Crow South through Delores Phillips’ only published novel, The Darkest Child (2004). The novel features one of the few representations of deafness in African American literature and serves as a rich text to explore the relationship between literary representations of deafness alongside black and deaf people’s material status in a society.