On Wednesday, March 20, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, an assistant professor in residence at the University of Connecticut’s history department and the head of communications and undergraduate outreach at the UConn Humanities Institute, will give the first faculty talk hosted by the Humanities Institute. The event will take place today in the UCHI Conference Room on the fourth floor of Homer D. Babbidge Library from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
The talk will be about the cultural significance of early 19th-century French poetry almanacs. The almanacs that will be showcased were once essentially poetry anthologies with calendars and sometimes souvenir pages marketed mainly to early 19th-century women. The talk will cover not only the poetry inside of the almanacs but also review how else the almanacs were used.
Zazzera’s work extends beyond presentations, as she has also published an article titled “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States,” which was awarded the 2015 Book History essay prize. She has also been awarded multiple fellowships, some of which fund her research.
Zazzera’s interests align with the movement of ideas particularly in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. While she has a project about the 19th-century French poetry almanacs in the works, her main focus is writing a book on France’s “bataille romantique,” which was the debate between romantics and classicists through an analysis of the press, theatre and literary scenes at the time.
Prior to her involvement with UCHI, Zazzera was the digital producer and Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at Lapham’s Quarterly, a history magazine. She wrote a total of 16 roundtables for the magazine. One of the articles she wrote was “Not a Girl, Not Yet a New Woman,” an article on Mrs. Humphrey Ward and the politics surrounding women’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Another notable article is “The Geography of the ‘Odyssey,’” which was about mapping the locations of Homer’s Greek epic “The Odyssey.”
If you have even a vague interest in French history, general history or poetry, this talk is worth attending. Although the poets are not here to appreciate the attention on their work, they can rest easy knowing their creations haven’t fallen to the wayside of history. Through talks such as Zazzera’s, the people who wrote in the almanacs weren’t forgotten in the future even if it may have seemed like they would be.
There will be other speaking events by UCHI faculty and fellows as listed on their events calendar. Preceding Zazzera’s talk on March 20, UCHI fellow, nonfiction filmmaker and assistant professor of journalism Martine Granby will host a talk from 12:15 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. in Babbidge Library based around her work-in-progress documentary film “TEN SECONDS OF SUGAR,” which tackles the topic of Black women’s experiences with the healthcare industry and the silencing of their mental health through conversations between Granby, her mother and her maternal grandmother. She will be screening segments of the film and commentating on them.
On Wednesday, March 27, UCHI fellow and associate professor of film and video Oscar Guerra will be offering a talk on documenting Latine mental health from 12:15 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. in the Babbidge Library.
Also on March 27 at the Babbidge Library, UCHI faculty member and assistant research professor of philosophy Julian Schloeder will be offering a talk from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on what being an “inauthentic self” means, defining “selfhood” as making a meaning for yourself, how stereotypes can be harmful in the search for personal meaning-making and how coming out as queer is making meaning out of incoherence.