BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.3//EN TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:VEVENT UID:487@1718.ucla.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250310T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250310T130000 DTSTAMP:20241206T163815Z URL:https://1718.ucla.edu/events/katherine-philips/ SUMMARY:Katherine Philips\, Meta-Metaphysical Poet DESCRIPTION:\nLecture by Arya Sureshbabu\, Ph.D. Candidate in English\, Uni versity of California\, Berkeley. Recipient of the 2024–25 Kenneth Karmi ole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship\n\nKatherine Philips (1632–64) occupies an unusual place in the canon of seventeenth-century poetry. Now alternatively billed as an apostle of female friendship or a proto-sapphic icon\, she was also known in her own time as an exemplary practitioner of intimacy. But a less adulatory strain of reception history reads her vers e as overstuffed with hyperbolic praise and extended conceits that fail to sustain readerly interest. This talk suggests that these seemingly contra dictory assessments of Philips are in fact connected: her poems and letter s express closeness through a disproportionate outpouring of attention to minor details\, petty situations\, and all-too-earthly individuals. Philip s’s preoccupation with the interplay between excess and diminution is as stylistic as it is thematic\; her copious adaptations of her poetic prede cessors index a process of intimate reading in addition to describing inti mate relationships among members of her literary coterie. Her self-conscio us reflections on the twinned practices of reading and writing are especia lly evident in her embellishments of John Donne’s poems\, where she iter atively revises his images with an assiduousness that anticipates modern c haracterizations of the metaphysical conceit’s simultaneous fragility an d force. Taking these resonances as a point of departure\, this presentati on explores how Philips’s poetics blur the lines between affection\, int erpretation\, and creative endeavor—and how eighteenth-century readers ’ fleeting encounters with her literary output remix and reactivate its intimate potentials.\n\nArya Sureshbabu is a PhD candidate in English with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the Univ ersity of California\, Berkeley. She is completing a dissertation on intim acy and textual minutiae in the poetry\, drama\, and correspondence of the English Renaissance. In addition to the Center &\; Clark\, her work ha s been supported by the Beinecke Library\, the Harry Ransom Center\, the U C Humanities Research Institute\, and the Society for the Study of Early M odern Women and Gender. Essays drawn from her dissertation are forthcoming in Shakespeare Studies and The Cambridge Companion to Aemilia Lanyer. She has further academic interests in Shakespearean adaptations\, early moder n women writers\, and epistolary form.\n\n\n\nThe lecture will take place via Zoom. To register to attend\, please fill out the form here.\n\n\n\nIm age: Detail from Insert 1r of Negotiolum bellae (Clark Library MS.1986.00 3)\, an eighteenth-century commonplace book that features poems by Katheri ne Philips and was passed down among women in the Springett family. The fu lly digitized manuscript is available here: https://calisphere.org/item/ar k:/21198/n1vg7z/.\n\n \;\n\n \;\n\n \;\n\n \;\n\n \;\n \n \; CATEGORIES:Lectures END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20250309T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR