Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors

Renowned literary theorist Stanley Fish will deliver the keynote address for Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors, Washington University’s third annual faculty book colloquium, at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 2, in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Celebrating Our Books honors the work of scholars from across the arts and sciences disciplines. Featured faculty presenters — who will read from their works and take questions from the audience — are Judith Evans Grubbs, professor of classics in Arts & Sciences, and James L. Gibson, the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences.

The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences. The Ann W. Olin Women’s Building is located just north of Olin Library on the university’s Hilltop Campus. For more information call (314) 935-5576.

In conjunction with Celebrating Our Books, the Washington University Campus Store will display books by colloquium participants, all of which will be available for purchase. Authors will be available after the colloquium to sign their works.

Fish is a distinguished professor of English, criminal justice and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also served as Dean of Arts dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1999-2004. A leading scholar on Milton, he is also a prominent social critic and public intellectual, but is perhaps best known for his work on interpretive communities, an off-shoot of reader-response criticism.

Grubbs is leading scholar in the field of Roman history. Her most recent book — Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood (2002) — collects, translates and discusses Latin and Greek sources for women’s interaction with the law in the Roman Empire (31 BCE-476 CE). Most of the sources — including some not previously available in reliable English translation — are from Roman law, particularly the Corpus Iuris of Justinian (the Digest and the Code of Justinian) and the Theodosian Code published in 438. The volume provides introductions and scholarly commentary both on the texts and on the problems of preservation of the sources.

Gibson’ research interests include comparative politics (especially processes of democratization), American politics, and quantitative research methods (especially survey research). His most recent book is Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (2004), which reports on the largest and most comprehensive study of post-apartheid attitudes in South Africa to date, involving a representative sample of all major racial, ethnic and linguistic groups. Grounding his analysis of “truth” in theories of collective memory, Gibson discovers that the process has been most successful in creating a common understanding of the nature of apartheid. He also speculates about whether the South African experience provides any lessons for other countries around the globe trying to overcome their repressive pasts.