This event is designed for interested graduate students and faculty members to engage with Prof. Goldgar and her scholarly interests in a seminar format.
Abstract: This seminar will discuss ways to read early modern disaster literature in the context of religious history, the history of observation, and the history of the emotions. We will focus on a particular text, a pamphlet published by Edward Pelham, an English Muscovy Company sailor, who along with seven comrades was stranded on the archipelago of Spitsbergen in the Arctic in 1630. Our discussion will ask what Pelham thought was important about his experience, how he expressed himself, and what he sought to accomplish by publishing the pamphlet. This can then be put in the context of the wider genre of disaster literature in the seventeenth century, considering its forms and its appeal to the market.
The seminar text is available online here.
