"Believing What We Read" is a mini-symposium about belief in literature and culture, focusing on the question of how literary belief both resembles and radically departs from other forms of conviction. Two leading scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, Deidre Lynch (Harvard) and Elaine Auyoung (Minnesota), will join Sophie Gee (Princeton) in presenting papers on the problem of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment faith and cultural value. Two advanced graduate students (Kelly Swartz and Priyanka Jacob) have been selected as co-respondents and will speak about the topic in relation to their own work in literary studies.

The symposium will appeal broadly across the disciplines of history, religion, philosophy and psychology.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of English, History, Philosophy and Comparative Literature; the Center for the Study of Religion; the University Center for Human Values; the Graduate Action Committee (English); the Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Doctoral Colloquium (English); the Victorian Studies Doctoral Colloquium (English)