Athens, Ga.- The University of Georgia’s Rodney M. Baine Lecture Series in the English Department presents internationally renowned scholar Howard D. Weinbrot, Ricardo Quintana Professor of English and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin. Weinbrot will give a lecture titled “Meeting the Monarch, Johnson, Boswell, and the Anatomy of a Genre” on Feb. 23 at 4 p.m. in room 265 Park Hall. He will discuss some of the different French, English and modern and eighteenth-century events in which a man or woman of letters meets the monarch or another royal. In addition to highlighting Johnson’s meeting with George III as portrayed in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Weinbrot will include Voltaire and Frederick the Great, Diderot, Catherine the Great, Sarah Siddons, Fanny Burney, and John Gay in his talk.
“Weinbrot’s contributions to the field of eighteenth-century studies have been — without question — considerable and significant,” said John Vance, professor of English at UGA. Among his many distinguished publications are The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (University of Chicago Press, 1969), Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton University Press, 1978), Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton University Press, 1982), Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essay on his Arts, Mind, Politics, and Afterlife (University of Delaware Press, 2005), and Menippean Satire Reconsidered, From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
The Rodney M. Baine Lecture Fund, established in 1981 by James Everitt Baine, is in commemoration of his father Professor Rodney M. Baine, distinguished 18th century scholar and teacher in the English Department at UGA. The series, created “to enrich the program of the Department of English of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences,” features eminent scholars in the field of eighteenth-century literature. It has included since 1985 Northrop Frye, Pat Rogers, Gwin Kolb, J. Paul Hunter, Claude Rawson, Michael McKeon and Marilyn Butler.
The lecture and the reception which follows in the Park Hall Library are free and open to the public.