DSR Lecture Series: "Unmooring Utopia: Death and Desire in Early Modern Christian Fictions"

When and Where

Thursday, February 06, 2025 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
JHB 318
Jackman Humanities Building
170 St George Street, Toronto ON M5R 2M8

Speakers

Constance Furey (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Description

In this talk Constance Furey reinterprets the relationship between death and desire in Thomas More’s Utopia, a 1516 work that gave its name to literary designs for ideal societies.

Concern with death—specifically suicide and the death penalty—is explicit in More’s account of a society Europeans encountered on an imaginary South American island. Yet the text says nothing about the violence reported in texts that informed More’s work, a silence aptly illustrated by an opaque skull map printed in Utopia’s 1518 edition.

Taking her lead from this eerie illustration, overlooked by most commentators, Furey argues that the way More’s text incorporates death’s fragments of strangeness into a new world might help us rethink societal ideals, then as now.

About the speaker

Constance Furey is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She co-founded the Center for Religion and the Human, and directs two of its initiatives: Teaching Religion in Public and the Being Human Institute for Emerging Scholars. Her latest book is the co-authored Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination, published by University of Chicago Press.