November is a busy month for the Early Modern Studies Working Group. On November 1st, we hosted a talk by Jane Hwang Degenhardt, titled “The ‘Kindness’ of Humans: Empathy, Race, and Kind in The Tempest and The Shape of Water.” Degenhardt is an associate professor in the department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Thirty-five people 
attended the talk including faculty and grad students from three departments and several undergraduates. The talk was followed by a robust Q&A.
Next week, the group will be hosting its two regular events: Transcribathon and the Cross Cultural Interactions Reading Group. Transcribathon will meet at 10am on Wednesday in the UCHI collaborative space, where we will be honing our paleography skills by continuing to transcribe John Ward’s mid-1600s diary. The reading group meets at noon in the UCHI conference room, where we will be discussing another chapter from Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. The chapter, by T.F. Earle, is titled “Black Africans versus Jews: Religious and Racial Tension in a Portugese Saint’s Play,” and can be found on the HuskyCT page for the Early Modern Studies Working Group.
If you are interested in any of our activities and not yet on our e-mail list, please contact us at earlymod@uconn.edu.
