5 X Friday: Professor John Watkins

Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English John Watkins first studied at England's Oxford University when he was a young man out of Arkansas by way of Indiana University. A Marshall Scholarship recipient, he was tasked to do exactly what he loved: "read like crazy," think, and write. Watkins has been back to Oxford many times since, as an Elizabethan scholar, but is looking forward to three months there this coming academic year, his longest visit in more than 15 years. He's been invited to be a senior research visitor at Oxford's Keble College--one of three honors he won this spring, along with Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. With his parents passed, he says, he doesn't go back to Arkansas; in many ways, Oxford has become his place of origin: "It does feel a lot like home." Read more.

1. You've been working on a book on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking. What are your goals for your 2014-15 sabbatical year?
I would like to get this manuscript finished. I think everyone going into a sabbatical says that. Where it is now, I've gotten the chapters drafted, but they're very drafty chapters. One of the things that happens when you're writing a book is that by the time you finish drafting those last chapters the first ones don't necessarily fit the book very well anymore--because your central conception of the project has changed. So this is my chance to sit down, start reading--feeling desperately ill and hating everything--and writing a clean manuscript.
[In Oxford] I have all the resources of the Bodleian Library, which is like the Library of Congress: It's a copyright library; they have an incredible manuscript collection. It is one of the best places on the planet to work. The other thing of course is you become part of the senior community there. You're having all your meals in college, which allows lots of fruitful conversation and lots of interdisciplinary exchange. I know people throughout the university--both in English and in history. Keble has a pretty strong Elizabethan faculty now, so it's a good place to end up if you're doing 16th, 17th century, including good diplomatic historians, good social historians, a wonderful literary scholar, Diana Purkiss.
2. Can you give an example of something you discovered while writing this book that you'll need to add to the first chapters?
I realized that there was a Virgilian thread that runs throughout this. At the end of the Aeneid, there is one of the great literary interdynastic marriages of all time. Aeneas the Trojan relocates his people to Italy; he's told by the gods that he will marry the princess of the local tribe; war breaks out, because of course someone else is interested in her; but at the end of the day peace is made, he does marry her. And the fusion of the native Latins with the interloping Trojans creates the basis of the Roman Empire, the Roman people. That myth comes up a lot in tributes to various marriages throughout the European centuries, so I'm going to bring that Virgilian subtext out more. It's fun, because this book circles back and answers questions that I dealt with 20 years ago writing my first book [The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic].
3. What do you appreciate most about Oxford?
Music, music, music. I have a real passion for early British music, modern British music: It's a great place to hear everything. It's the kind of place you can go and have an incredible conversation about Nicholas Maw or Michael Tippett; people know what you're talking about.
I love working in the Bodleian. I swear I write better there. It's a gorgeous 17th-century building with massive windows. Yes, it can get cold in the winter, but you wear gloves. I have some amazingly happy memories of reading [John] Donne's sermons, setting sunlight filtering through the glass at the Bodleian--it was the perfect place to be reading Donne since he's so death-obsessed. I think that was the best educational experience I ever had.
Another thing that I really love about Oxford is that it is walkable. Oxford is a city, but the university is the heart of the historical core, and that's manageable by foot. A lot of faculty either live in college or very close, and that allows conversation to happen. If you're going to a concert, it's a five- or ten-minute walk. I cannot wait to be back to that. You can walk to country villages by foot, with wonderful little pubs and things. If you get on the train, you can be in deep, deep, deep English countryside in no time.
This essay that I'm writing now, it began with a long walk there with a friend who's a Russian historian, and a conversation we had on why so many diplomats end up becoming creative writers--what is the link there? I'm getting an essay out of it; I'll probably end up getting a book out of it.
4. More, please, on that essay?
One of the things that can be often fun about a sabbatical year is you have a little bit of time not to deal with your central project but to think about something else that will sort of keep you going for the future. Increasingly, I'm thinking about international law. There's a standard problem in international law. It's the most basic problem you can have: Does it exist? Putin moves troops past the Eastern border, and Obama screams, "You've violated international law." But what is international law exactly? It's not produced by a legislature. It's not like there's international policing authority that can really do anything. There is the international court, but that's brand new, and it's not at all clear what its jurisdictions are.
What that sounds like to me is that the project of international law is finally a project of the imagination. The second you're saying, "Does it really exist?" you are saying, "Or is it a dream?" The argument I think I want to make is that we will be making better and stronger international law if we realize that its imaginative quality is indeed the best thing it's got going--the fact that it isn't tainted by a political process that creates it (in the way that national legal codes are), that it can actually be a place for free legal speculation.
This is why [16th-century poet] Philip Sidney is becoming important. Sidney's whole defense of poetry is: Poets are being attacked by the Puritans because they are indulging in make believe, writing things that are not true; Sidney's point is that, yes, what we write is not true, but: the historian can give you a brazen world, we can give you a golden one. In the process of imagining golden worlds, with better people in them than you will find in day-to-day experience, we can inspire everyone to be better. One of Sidney's associates was an Italian living in England named Alberico Gentili, who wrote one of the first treatises of international law. He dedicated it to Sidney. Sidney had certainly done diplomatic work. And his Arcadia, this enormous prose romance, is talking a lot about how states relate to each other, and how they relate to each other on a legal basis. So I think this is a good place to start teasing out what the role of the imagination is in the ordering of world systems. It's certainly something to keep me out of trouble.
5. What could get you into trouble in Oxford?
The only drawback is English food. I'm eating in college. Every morning will begin with the three most frightening words in the English language: "full English breakfast." The dangerous thing for me is that I actually like that kind of stuff. But you just cannot do it for three months--the way I did it for two years [while a student at Oxford]. I'm still running 5K a day to make up for what I did to my body when I was 22. Everything has a cream sauce. And the vegetables: If there's a vitamin left, you boil it some more.
It is getting harder, it is getting much harder, to find good country pub food. You know, the classic meat pie with the cold water suet crust. I actually tracked one down last summer by taking a train to Banbury, getting off, and walking five miles into the country. I got the Platonic form of meat pie. But it took work.

5 X Friday: PhD Candidate Jessica Apolloni

This fall, doctoral student Jessica Apolloni was chosen to be one of ten participants in an inaugural fellowship from the Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance (another doctoral candidate, Caitlin McHugh, also was selected). The fellows will spend five weeks next spring working with a distinguished group of senior Renaissance scholars, first in Oxford, England, then in Rome, and finally Chicago. Each receives a stipend of $10,000 in addition to room, board, and airfare. Apolloni, who received her BA in English at Minnesota, also won a fellowship in her first year of doctoral studies--a Fulbright to spend a semester in Italy. It was then she developed a fascination with early modern stories of criminal activity, which is now the subject of her dissertation. Read on.

1. You received your BA in English (as well as in Italian and Global Studies) here at the U. What made you want to stick around?
As an undergraduate, I had a lot of different intellectual interests that aligned well with my passion for reading and thinking about texts. When I considered graduate school, the literature department was where I felt I could still pursue all of those other interests by analyzing anything from translation theory to global economics in a given text. I was also inspired by the wonderful faculty in the English department and knew this would be a supportive environment for the PhD. The classes that I took in every subfield, from African Cinema with Charlie Sugnet to North American Imperialisms with Jani Scandura, exemplified our faculty's dedication to their own work as well as student development.
In terms of my particular subfield, I took an honors Shakespeare course with Shirley Nelson Garner that was influential in focusing my interests in early modern English-Italian relations. Above all, whenever I would mention my research interests to faculty, even faculty members from quite separate departments, they would tell me I really needed to work with John Watkins--and that has proven to be absolutely true. I couldn't imagine having a better adviser for my project, so I had to stay at the U!
2. How did your first year Fulbright study in Italy for a semester influence your studies since?
I received the Fulbright grant at a perfect time, as I had just completed one semester of graduate coursework and was still in the process of narrowing down my academic interests. Outside of my teaching responsibilities, I was able to explore numerous archives, including the Vatican Library. I became fascinated with criminal accounts and procedures, ranging from descriptions of local bar brawls to intellectual discussions of crime in letters from the powerful Medici family. Having the time to investigate a range of materials is how I discovered and developed my dissertation topic on Italian criminal narratives circulating in England. In the process, I learned a lot from the group of Fulbright grantees residing in Rome--including how to navigate the difficulties of working in Italian archives.
3. More, please, about your dissertation project?
My dissertation is focused on accounts of criminality in Renaissance Italy that are then translated and transformed into an English context. The working title is "Dialogues of Violence: Intertextual Community Conflict in Early Modern English and Italian Criminal Narratives." The project is centered on community conflicts stemming from legal practices, and I aim for it to be an innovative understanding of the development and expansion of legal systems. In the process, I hope to rethink our understanding of Renaissance law using interdisciplinary methods, especially those derived from literary, legal, and cultural studies. The specific Italian texts I am focusing on include Italian novelle and news pamphlets or avvisi, which contain detailed accounts of criminal activity and are perhaps the earliest form of communicating crime to a wider audience. These Italian texts are then translated into the English literary milieu and end up on the "Italianate" English stage from playwrights like Shakespeare and Webster. Tracing this intertextual dialogue will provide insights into the ways ideas on crime communicate across geographical, political, and cultural barriers.
4. Can you give an example of a "crime narrative" you find fascinating?
My first dissertation chapter is on judicial authority in Italian novelle, so I spent the summer reading through hundreds of these fantastic short stories from the 14th and 15th centuries. One of my favorites is in a novella collection from Franco Sacchetti, who was actually also a head judge in multiple Italian comuni. In the tale, a man from Florence is invited to be the head judge of a small, unruly territory. He immediately faces a case where the community is heavily divided, and he is afraid to take sides, saying to himself that he did not come to this place to die. After he fails in his attempt to have the two sides come to their own agreement, he ends up fleeing the city. Novelle like this illustrate the difficult position judges would be in as both influential insiders and vulnerable outsiders to a given community. What's more, it paints a captivating picture of judicial authority that is difficult to locate in legal documents such as court cases or decrees.
5. Congratulations on receiving the fellowship with the Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance. What are your hopes for the experience?
One of the main reasons I applied to the Academy was to work closely with the two professors running the seminar, Edward Muir and Regina Schwartz. Muir is an incredible legal historian who specifically works on crimes like vendetta in Italy. Schwartz works on legal concerns from a more theoretical perspective, and I am eager to see how her insights might shape the way I approach legal texts. In addition, I am excited to work with the interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students in our seminars. Lastly, the stipend provided will allow me to dedicate a semester to dissertation work as well as carry out a short research trip this summer to conduct archival research on legal documents in Italy.