Premier Scholar of Medieval Memory and Rhetoric to Present Guest Lecture Today

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Please join the departments of English and history, the medieval and renaissance studies and humanities programs, and the Brown Chair in Literacy for a guest lecture by Mary J. Carruthers. “Memory, the Engine of Thought” will be presented at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 12, in Old Main’s Giffels Auditorium.

These five courses of study within the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences combine to highlight Carruthers’s interdisciplinary studies in memory training and rhetorical practices of the Middle Ages used in clerical and court cultures. Her scholarship focuses on compositional and performative practice in the arts of the 12th through the mid-15th centuries in Europe.

Carruthers serves as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature and Professor of English, emerita, at New York University. She has been named Quondam Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in addition to many other fellowships and honors. She has been elected president of both the New Chaucer Society and The Medieval Academy of America.

Her field-defining publications include Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages (2010), The Book of Memory (2nd Ed., 2008), and The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology (2002).

The event is free and open to the public.