Athens, Ga. – Robin Chapman Stacey, the Howard and Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History and adjunct professor of women’s studies at the University of Washington, will speak on the University of Georgia campus on Wednesday, March 26, at 4 p.m. in room 265 Park Hall. Her presentation is free and open to the public.
Stacey is widely recognized among Celticists, medieval historians and legal scholars as one of the most brilliant scholars of her generation and an expert on early Irish and Welsh law.
Her first book, The Road to Judgment: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales (1994), received the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of North America and the Hywel Dda Prize.
Her research on law and performance in early Ireland earned her both a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Senior Fellowship. Her third book, Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland, (2007), was supported with a Guggenheim book subvention and has already received critical acclaim.
In her next book, Law as Literature in Medieval Wales, she argues “that far from being the objective [albeit idealized] records of native Welsh custom we have traditionally understood them to be, the Welsh law books functioned in fact as one of the most important venues for commentary on thirteenth-century Welsh politics.”
Her lecture in Park Hall will address this point, that law was for the Welsh a form of literature-of political fiction and commentary, specifically-and that it needs to be read accordingly.
The event is sponsored by the department of English and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.