lectures @Sydney

CAROLYN DINSHAW The eerie figure of the foliate head, at once utterly familiar and totally weird, was a decorative motif well nigh ubiquitous in medieval church sculpture in Western Europe. This imagined mixture of human and vegetable - a head sprouting leaves or made up of vegetation - became known in the twentieth century as the Green Man. It has proven to be a powerful icon of boundary crossings (sexual, racial) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the US, UK, and Commonwealth countries. This aesthetically intricate, affectively intense image represents a body that is a strange mixture, a weird amalgam: it pictures intimate trans-species relations. Carolyn Dinshaw describes foliate heads in their medieval settings and then traces the contemporary uptake of this imagery in sexual subcultures in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, focusing particularly on the traumatic contexts of HIV/ AIDS and of decolonization out of which new queer worlds are being imagined.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100 - 1800 presents:

I’VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN:THE GREEN MAN, TRANS-SPECIES BODIES, AND QUEER WORLDMAKING

When: 1pm-2:30pm, Tuesday 19 August 2014 Location: Woolley Common Room, Woolley Building

University of SydneyContact: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au ALL WELCOME

Carolyn Dinshaw is Chair and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Department of English, NYU, and Dis-tinguished International Visiting Fellow for the ARC Centre of Excel-lence for the History of Emotions. Her most re-cent book is How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012).