Waller Lectureship Series Features Carissa Harris

On Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021, at 7 p.m.

Carissa Harris (Photo by Carissa Harris)

On Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021, the annual John O. Waller Lectureship for the Arts will feature Carissa Harris, PhD, associate professor of English at Temple University. Harris will be presenting on the topic “Maternal Fury: Women’s Collective Rage at State Violence, from the Middle Ages to the Movements for Black Lives.” Her talk covers medieval dramatic renditions of King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents in conversation with mothers’ roles in the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements. The event will take place in Newbold Auditorium in Buller Hall at 7 p.m., and can also be viewed online at https://www.andrews.edu/livestream/. 

Harris’ research and teaching focuses on gender and sexuality in medieval England and Scotland. She earned her doctoral degree from Northwestern University, and her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Her work has been published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Journal of the Early Book Society, New Literary History, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Review of English Studies, Chaucer Review, the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, and Medieval Feminist Forum. She also writes essays on topics such as medieval rape culture, the history of “Teen Mom” entertainment programming, medieval drug-facilitated sexual assault, “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” medieval impotence trials, and the history of the word “wench” for outlets including Avidly, Slate, Vox, Electric Literature, The Washington Post, Narratively and others.

The Waller Lectureship was established in 2008 in honor of late English professor John O. Waller, a Victorian scholar. Waller taught at Andrews University for 29 years, serving 16 of those years as chair of the Department of English. His book “Circle of Friends: The Tennysons and the Washingtons of Park House” was published by the Ohio University Press in 1986, and he was involved in important research about Seventh-day Adventist attitudes toward fiction. Past programs for the lectureship have included: Donnet Francis’ “What’s Left to Imagine: Writing Female Citizenship in the Caribbean Antiromance” in 2012, “The Mass and the Theater: Othello and Sacrifice” by Regina Schwartz in 2013, and “Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict” by Marilyn McEntyre in 2020.