Kate Heslop | Poetry's Media in Premodern Scandinavia

This is an Archive of a Past Event

For our second Poetics event of the quarter, Professor Kate Heslop (Department of Scandinavian, UC Berkeley) will give a paper entitled “Poetry's Media in Premodern Scandinavia,” which is attached below. Professor Elaine Treharne (Department of English, Stanford) will provide a response.

Heslop_art_insert_2pp.pdf


About the Speaker

Professor Kate Heslop’s research centers on Old Norse textual culture, especially skaldic and eddic poetry, the sagas and the heroic tradition. She approaches this material from a medial perspective, and asks what "media theory": we can detect–in an epoch before the mass media—in Old Norse texts and images. Relevant here is not only the media transition associated with the arrival of manuscript textuality, but also multi- and inter-medial phenomena in images, inscriptions, and texts. A complementary area of current research interest, medieval Scandinavian representations and practices of commemoration and mourning, offers a site to think about religious mediation, the in-between space between the living and the dead, and the link between medium, memory and forgetting.