Five Nordic Ph.D. students have been invited to an exclusive masterclass with the Holberg Prize Laureate Stephen Greenblatt.
Stephen Greenblatt is a John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is awarded the Holberg Prize for his impact on the practices of history, literary studies and cultural criticism, and for having been one of the most distinctive and influential voices in the humanities over four decades. Greenblatt is regarded as one of the most important Shakespeare and Renaissance scholars of his generation, and he is the founder of New Historicism.
The masterclass will discuss why humans have needed to construct accounts of our earliest beginnings — accounts that are inescapably speculative — and what is at stake in different versions. How do the products of the imagination take on the substance of reality, and what work do they do for us?
Participants
Mark Friis Hau from Aarhus University.
«My work centers on why (and how) specific humans have constructed particular accounts of their earliest beginnings; I study not the origin of people, but the origin of a people. A Masteclass with Professor Greenblatt will greatly illuminate the universal, human aspects of orgin myths – hopefully inspiring my research in exciting, new directions.»
Mark Hau is a PhD candidate in European Studies at Aarhus University, researching the interplay between national and European identities in the stateless nations of Scotland and Catalonia. A political anthropologist, he has done ethnographic fieldwork in Barcelona among members of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, as well as in Scotland with the Scottish National Party.
Yoav Tirosh from the University of Iceland.
«The way we talk of our beginnings has more to do with our present than we usually realize, and I am excited to explore this notion more in depth.»
Yoav finished a B.A. in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and afterwards moved to Iceland for M.A. and Ph.D studies in Old Icelandic literature, under the supervision of Prof. Ármann Jakobsson. Yoav’s main scholarly interests lie in the study of cultural memory and genre, and his Ph.D project tackles these issues in the context of the extant medieval manuscripts of the Old Icelandic Ljósvetninga saga.
Godeline Gertrude Perk from Umeå University.
«Being intrigued by every “In the beginning” and “once upon a time”, I cannot wait to discuss the stories humanity tells of itself.»
Godeline Perk describes herself as a bookworm from the Netherlands and a PhD student in English literature at Umeå University (northern Sweden). Many topics and literary genres fascinate her; her research, however, is about the first English woman author, Julian of Norwich (c. 1342- after 1416), studied within the frameworks of narratology and medieval vernacular literary theory.
Carlos Hernández Garcés from the University of Oslo.
«A magnificent opportunity to come to grips with the thorny question of origin stories under the guidance of Stephen Greenblatt.»
Carlos Hernández Garcés studied Classics at the Autonomous University (Madrid) and Archaeology at the University of Alcalá (Alcalá de Henares) from 2004 till 2011. As archaeologist, he has worked over long periods of time in Ireland, Spain and Greece, where in recent years he has regularly taken part in two of the ongoing projects of the Norwegian Institute at Athens. As philologist, he gathered experience drawing up lemmata for the Greek-Spanish Legal Byzantine Lexicon from 2010 till 2012, and since 2013 he has carried out his work at the University of Oslo, initially as research assistant preparing lemmata within the Medicalia Online project and currently as PhD student in Greek. The focus of his project is on the perception of time and the interrelated mechanisms of memory and history in shaping collective identity as witnessed in Herodotus’ Histories.
Panu Heimonen from the University of Helsinki.
«Origin of the good and evil are to be found in great music and literature.»
Panu Heimonen has been educated at the Sibelius-Academy (MA, Music theory and analysis) and the University of Helsinki (MA, Musicology, Philosophy). At present he pursues doctoral studies at the University of Helsinki. His research centres on music analysis and narrative theory with applications to various musical contexts, including musical performance. He has special interest in bringing together narrative ways of analysing music with traditional music analytical techniques such as Schenkerian analysis and musical Formenlehre. Besides the music of F Liszt he works on music analytical and narratological questions as they relate to first movement concerto form in WA Mozart’s piano concertos. He has published in the journal Res Facta Nova (“Concerto Questions”). His other research interests include intertextuality in music analysis.
Relevant reading:
- Første mosebok, Bibelen, Kapittel 1-3.
- Gilgamesj-sagaen (Anbefalt engelsk oversettelse: 2005, av Benjamin R. Foster)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Moralens genealogi (1887)
- Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 1960 (Part II: Introduction: “The ‘Myths’ of the Beginning and of the End”; and Chapter 3 “The ‘Adamic’ Myth and the ‘Eschatological’ Vision of History”)