Microliteratures is an innovative examination of writings done in the margins of medieval manuscripts and early modern books. Not always as formal as glosses, sometimes feverish and abbreviated, these marginal writings or, "microliteratures," are the product of readers thinking with the text at the center of the page. Jesús R. Velasco argues that microliteratures are not private annotations but, rather, a humanistic activity performed in the public sphere. These marginal engagements with texts are made public to future readers of the same book.

Surveying the microliteratures of a wide range of medieval and early modern Iberian genres—legal, religious, chivalric, and political texts—Velasco finds that in the shared space and time of reading, microliterary actions and artifacts are also models of public humanities work that connects texts to contemporary issues. Microliteratures emerge from this ambitious book as a way of understanding the self as a reflective and politically engaged reader in conversation with past, present, and future readers as contemporaries.

Speakers

Jesús R. Velasco works on Law and Humanities in the Medieval Mediterranean basin. His latest books include Microliteratures (Cornell, 2025), Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages (U of Pennsylvania, 2020), and Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile (U of Pennsylvania, 2010). His work has been published in New Literary History, Hispanic Review, La Corónica, Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques Médiévales, and Studi Ispanici, among others. He is currently preparing a book-length monograph tentatively titled Law and Humanities: The Question of Fiction. He teaches a series of graduate seminars on Law and Humanities (on fiction and on emotions so far), and undergraduate courses that delve into the multilingual and multiconfessional Iberian world (for instance: The End of the World, Rebels and Public Humanities, and Iberian Nights).

Hannah Weaver is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and co-host of the podcast Proust Curious. She teaches and writes about the literature of medieval Europe, particularly the regions now known as England and France. Her first monograph, Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell, 2024), argues that interpolation is the signature form of medieval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory. Her articles on everything from time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the treachery of incomprehensible English to the relationship of genre to purgatory have appeared in ELH, New Literary History, New Medieval Literatures, JMEMS, Viator, and elsewhere.

Stathis Gourgouris is a Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996); Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003); Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham, 2013); The Perils of the One (Columbia, 2019); Nothing Sacred (Columbia, 2023), and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2010), Thinking with Balibar (Fordham, 2020), and The Cavafy Dossier (2021). In addition, he has published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties at Columbia University and a directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is the author of several books, including Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015), The Counterrevolution: How our Government Went to War Against its Own Citizens (2018), Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (2020) and Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (2023), and an active death penalty defense attorney. He has edited Michel Foucault’s lectures in French and English.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.