Michele Osherow
Associate Professor, English
Keeping the Girls in Stitches: Embroidering Biblical Narrative in the Seventeenth Century
This project examines seventeenth-century women’s embroidered pictures of the Bible as a form of biblical commentary. Osherow argues that women’s renderings offer alternative readings of biblical narratives and challenge dominant interpretations head-on. Scholars of early modern women’s writing increasingly recognize the intersections among women’s visual and verbal textualities. Nonetheless, these biblical embroideries have largely gone ignored, dismissed as “stifling shows of feminine piety” (Orlin, Renaissance Culture). Such thinking suggests that the women behind these canvases interpreted biblical narratives through a prescribed lens, that their readings are inherited and unremarkable. But the assumption is flawed and unfair. Early modern women knew their Bibles and their representations are provocative. Stitched renderings were not bound to scriptural accuracy: characters are placed unexpectedly in scenes, and various episodes were often worked into a single stitched piece. What emerges is a stunning complexity of material in keeping with the textual intricacies of the Bible itself.
Mirjam Voerkelius
Assistant Professor, History
Making Darwin Soviet: The Moscow Darwin Museum and Ideas about Nature in the Soviet Union
This will be the first book-length study in English on the reception of Darwinism in the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks put Darwin on a pedestal. They drew parallels between Darwinism and Marxism as materialist theories of development and considered evolutionary theory a powerful “weapon” in their war on religion. However, Voerkelius’ work intervenes in the existing literature to show that Darwinism remained surprisingly controversial in the Soviet Union. Darwin’s emphasis on gradualism and chance conflicted with the Bolshevik notion of history as advancing via revolutions. Moreover, Darwin conceptualized humankind as differing from animals in degree, but not in kind, which challenged the anthropocentric vision of our species as emancipated from and a conqueror of nature. Thus, although the Bolshevik revolutionaries made Darwinism the fulcrum in their revolutionary project, Voerkelius argues that Soviet scientists and ideologues struggled to reconcile Darwinism with their revolutionary worldview.
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