Renaissance studies is focus of Gottschalk lecture

Harry Berger Jr., professor emeritus of literature and art history at the University of California-Santa Cruz, will give the 24th annual Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, Monday, March 31, at 4:30 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Auditorium D of Goldwin Smith Hall on campus.

The title of the lecture is "Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo's Cave: Vasari's Lives of the Artists and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship." It is sponsored by the Cornell Department of English and is free and open to the public.

Berger is a leading scholar and critic of European Renaissance literature. His most recent books include The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books and Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance, both published in 2000. His other books, on Shakespeare, Spenser, Renaissance pastoral and allegory, have helped to shape Renaissance studies over the past four decades.

Berger's interests range widely over topics in cultural studies, history, rhetoric, visual culture, classicism and the classics, philosophy, performance, biography and allegory. He has written on Plato, Virgil, Dante, Beowulf, Chaucer, Leonardo da Vinci and Pico della Mirandola, as well as on Marvell, Shakespeare and Spenser. His forthcoming books, Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations and The Villain's Discourse in Shakespeare: Richard III and Othello, both due out this year, give an indication of his continuing engagement with central topics in the field.

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, professor of English at Cornell and a scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of The Meanings of Hamlet (1972), who died in 1977 at the age of 38.

A reception in the English lounge of Goldwin Smith Hall will follow Berger's lecture.