'Deadly Words' with Hannah Johnson
Join us for a discussion of some of the challenges involved in translating academic work for broader audiences. Deadly Words explores the deep history of contemporary problems of exclusion and violence by examining stories people told in the premodern past when they wielded words as weapons. Working within a venerable tradition of public scholarship, Johnson constructs a synthetic account of the disparate threads of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim ideas in the pre-modern world, ending with an examination of the misogynist history of the early modern witch hunts. This project aims to demystify the relationships between stories and legends people told one another in the past, and narratives we often hear reflected in representations of outgroups in the present. Johnson will discuss some of the challenges of reshaping her scholarship to address an audience of generalists, particularly in the context of today’s fraught politics.
About Hannah Johnson
Hannah Johnson is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and a short-term fellow at the ACRMS this term. Her current project, "Deadly Words: Muslims, Jews, and Witches in the First Era of Fake News", is an academic trade book on the history of violent persecution in premodern Europe. Johnson’s previous works include "Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History", and a book co-written with Heather Blurton under the aegis of an ACLS Fellowship, "The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale".