Lecture Examines How Protestant-Catholic Conflicts Impacted Early Exploration in America

CHESTERTOWN—Dr. Andrea Frisch, Director of Graduate Studies in French at the University of Maryland, will lecture Monday, March 21 at 5 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of Miller Library on the Washington College campus. Her talk, entitled "Multicultural Encounters: How European Religious Disputes Shaped Early Modern Images of Amerindians," will explore the role played by religious differences between Catholics and Protestants during the early stages of the exploration of the Americas.

A specialist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Frisch received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. She researched law and literature for the 2004 book The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and recently completed a book about the impact of the civil wars of the sixteenth century on the literature and aesthetics of seventeenth-century France.

Her work has appeared in Representations, Romanic Review, Discourse, Esprit Créateur and Modern Language Quarterly. Frisch has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities and, most recently, from the National Humanities Center.

Sponsored by the College’s Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, the Department of Modern Languages, and the Department of Art and Art History, the lecture is free and open to the public.