A Talk by Ari Friedlander (University of Mississippi) on “From Babel to Biopolitics: Class, Sexuality and Race in Early Modern English Rogue Literature”

As part of the two-part Critical Perspectives Lecture Series, the UNC Asheville English Department welcomes guest lecturer Ari Friedlander, assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Friedlander’s talk will examine the representation of rogues and Romani people in Thomas Dekker’s Lantern and Candlelight (1608), arguing that their depiction as allegedly troublesome social groups portrays them as sub-populations whose labor and sexuality require proper governance. As Friedlander will show, the invention of English biopolitics—the governmental supervision and regulation of bodies—is intimately tied to the construction and maintenance of low social status, which is marked by the (supposed) sexual promiscuity and racial otherness. This talk comes from Friedlander’s forthcoming book Rogue Sexuality: Desire, Status and Biopolitics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Register for the event through Zoom

The Critical Perspectives series aims to bring the analytical insights of scholars, theorists, and critics working in literary and cultural studies into our English classrooms and broader academic community at UNC Asheville. A complement to our Visiting Writers series, Critical Perspectives draws no hard line between “creative” and “critical” work but gives focus to speakers who model contemporary modes of analysis in literary fields. Series topics correspond with and enrich current classes offered by English faculty, and collectively range across various approaches and subjects (historical, cultural, theoretical, formal) in contemporary literary studies.

More about Ari Friedlander: Ari Friedlander is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. His book, Rogue Sexuality: Desire, Status and Biopolitics in Early Modern English Literature, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022. For JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, he co-edited and wrote the introduction to a special issue called “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” Other publications on sexuality, gender, class, and disability, have appeared or are forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature, The Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Embodiment, and Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). His research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the Volkswagen Stiftung.