Event
Global Discovery Series: Nationalism, Literature, Family History
The Global Discovery Lecture Series lets you explore the world virtually, both far and near, with Penn faculty members and your fellow alumni community. Each live, interactive lecture features Penn professors sharing new and innovative research on a variety of topics. Participants will have the opportunity to ask in-depth questions and are sure to learn something new in each one hour session.
David Wallace is currently editing a three-volume work for Oxford University Press, with 110 contributors, called National Epics. This project has an interactive website, developed in association with Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities. This webinar will take a look at both the book project and a related seminar, described below, and how they aim to explore, finally, how mastery of local and national understandings helps form a global picture.
The “National Epics” course asks students to consider what imaginative text has a given nation chosen to ‘represent’ itself to the world? When was that choice made, and how well is it holding up? The choice for India has been the Mahabharata for 2000 years, but what of the United States? The class covers one nation and one text per week, beginning in western Europe (France, Spain, Ireland, England, Iceland), pivoting across Eurasia (Russia, Mongolia) and then on to India, Korea, Vietnam, China, among others. Students come to see how their own family histories, always complex, interact with and form part of national sagas.
Featured Speaker
David Wallace is a Londoner who was educated at York, Perugia and Cambridge (Ph.D. 1983); he became a US citizen in 2013. He taught at Stanford, UT Austin, and Minnesota before joining Penn as Judith Rodin Professor in 1996; he has since held visiting professorships at Melbourne, London, Princeton, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem (twice). He has served as President of the Medieval Academy of America and was awarded the Sir Israel Gollancz Prize by the British Academy. He has chaired both English and Romance Language Departments at Penn and has made documentary features for BBC Radio. He has directed the Penn English in London Program three times, most recently in 2023. His current research project, with Oxford University Press, is global in scope: see nationalepics.com, for an interactive website.