Symposium on the Humanities

Hamline University invites the public to its annual Symposium on the Humanities lecture, which this year features English scholar Ingrid Sharp, who will discuss the treatment of ‘surplus women’ after the First World War.

Her talk, entitled “Sinister Spinsters and ‘Imaginary Widows’: The Surplus Women Debate in Weimar Germany,” will be held on Thursday, November 19 at 7:30 p.m. in Klas Center, Kay Fredericks Room, 1535 Taylor Avenue on Hamline’s Saint Paul campus. The event is free and open to all.

Ingrid Sharp is senior lecturer in German and director of undergraduate studies for German, Russian, and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds School of Modern Languages and Cultures in Leeds, England. She is coeditor of The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–1919 and co-produced a five volume edition of Josephine Butler’s Diseases of the Body Politic: Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns.

Sharp has written extensively on gender and conflict in the context of the First World War and co-organized two major international conferences: The Women’s Movement in Wartime, 1914–1919 and Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923.

Sharp’s work on gender relations in Germany during the First World War and the Weimar Republic has recently appeared in Edinburgh German Yearbook 2 Masculinity and German Culture; Minerva Journal of Women and War; Journal of the History of Sexuality; Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic;  Violence, Culture, and Identity in Germany and Austria; and New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930.

Sharp and her work will be the focus of two events at Hamline, including the keynote lecture on November 19. She will also lead an informal brown bag discussion titled “Kathe Kollwitz and Otto Dix: German Artists Bearing Witness to the First World War” on Wednesday, November 18 from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. in Sorin Hall, Sorin A&B, 1535 Englewood Avenue.

The Hamline University Symposium on the Humanities was created to ensure a heightened visibility and strengthened commitment to the humanities at Hamline. The symposium is funded by the Endowed Chair in the Humanities, which is held by a distinguished professor from a central discipline in the humanities. The chair's activities and the symposium lecture series work together to raise the visibility of the humanities at Hamline and to signal the importance the university places on this central intellectual area.

For more information please contact Kristin Mapel Bloomberg at 651-523-2091.