FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers September 14, 2005 2005-2006/007 Lecturer at UIUC to discuss work of 17th-century female author and spy Margaret Ferguson, Professor of English at the University of California-Davis, will present a lecture titled, “The Illicit ‘I’: Aphra Behn's Theory and Practice of Translation,” Thursday, Oct. 6, at 5:15 p.m., in the Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, on the U of I. campus. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception for Professor Ferguson. Professor Ferguson's talk focuses on Aphra Behn, a late 17th-century novelist, playwright, poet, polemical essayist, and spy for the Crown. Her work as a spy arguably shapes her many authorial personae, which play on the relation between the speaking "I" and the reader or spectator's powers of apprehension through the organ of the eye. Ferguson’s talk will center on an essay on prose translation in which Behn argues for a theoretical paradigm--the Copernican universe--in which the evidence of the ordinary eye cannot be trusted to reveal the truth. Ferguson says she considers Behn's theory and practice of translation in relation to cultural debates about nationalism, gender and class hierarchies, and the competing truth claims of religion and science. Extending lines of research on the relation between vernacular translation and non-elite forms of literacy explored in her book Dido's Daughters, Ferguson's talk comes from a new book project analyzing questions of style and ideologies of authorial ownership in the writings of Aphra Behn. Professor Ferguson is one of the most authoritative scholars of women’s studies and comparative Renaissance studies today. Her recent book, “Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France” (U. Chicago Press, 2003), is the recipient of a number of notable prizes, including: the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, the Best Book Prize of 2004 of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (co-winner), René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association (Honorable Mention), the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize of 2005 of Renaissance Society of America (Honorable Mention), and the Guggenheim Publication Award. Professor Ferguson has held appointments, in addition to her current position at UC-Davis, at Columbia, Colorado, Yale, Berkeley, and Middlebury College. In addition to the prize-winning “Dido’s Daughters,” her monograph “Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry,” some 10 edited volumes, and 30 articles in leading journals attest to her stature in the field. The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) reading group, “Theorizing the Early Modern,” organized by Stephanie Hilger, Marcus Keller, and Mara Wade, initiated Ferguson’s scholarly visit to UIUC, which is co-sponsored by the IPRH reading group: “Critical British Studies: Sovereignty”; the UIUC departments of French, English, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and History; the UIUC programs in Comparative and World Literature, Medieval Studies, Writing Studies, Women’s Studies; the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory; and International Studies and Programs.