Katherine Ibbett

Tuesday, September 25, 7:30 p.m., Joe Rosenfield '25 Center, Room 101

Compassion and the response to difference (Paris 1650, Chicago 2010)

Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford; she has also taught at the University of Michigan and University College London. She received her BA from the University of Oxford, and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Ibbett works on early modern literature, culture, and political thought. Ibbett teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature and culture as well as classes in critical theory; she’s currently developing a class on histories of race in France. In terms of research, Katherine Ibbett is the author of Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (2017). Compassion’s Edge explores a range of genres, exploring the affective undertow of religious toleration. The book explores the language of fellow-feeling – pity, compassion, charitable care – that flourished in the century or so after the Wars of Religion. Her book is not a story about compassion overcoming difference, but rather about compassion reinforcing divides. This project was supported by a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, and in 2018 won the Biennial Book Prize of the Society for Renaissance Studies. Her first book, The Style of the State in French Theater (2009), addresses tragedy and theories of political action, and she is currently working on a project entitled Liquid Empire, about the writing of water in early modern France and its territories, from the lyric poets of the sixteenth century to the Mississippi settlements of the 1700s. The project takes up the figure of the riverain to think through how river writing shapes a poetics of resource and residency, from the poet to the washerwoman, the Indigenous canoeist to the Versailles nymph. For this new project, Professor Ibbett has carried out research for the American tributaries as a visiting fellow at the John Carter Brown library in Providence and at the Library Company of Philadelphia.