Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies

Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship   Lecture by Arya Sureshbabu, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California, Berkeley. Recipient of the 2024–25 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship Katherine Philips (1632–64) occupies an unusual place in the canon of seventeenth-century poetry. Now alternatively billed as an apostle of female friendship or a proto-sapphic icon, she was also known in her own time as an exemplary practitioner of intimacy. But a less adulatory strain of reception history reads her verse as overstuffed with hyperbolic praise and extended conceits that fail to sustain readerly interest. This talk suggests that these seemingly contradictory assessments...