{"id":1202,"date":"2026-03-06T11:36:05","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T16:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2026-03-26T11:41:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:41:12","slug":"singleton-center-distinguished-lecture-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/2026\/03\/06\/singleton-center-distinguished-lecture-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Singleton Center Distinguished Lecture 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Charles S. Singleton Center Distinguished Lecturer for 2026 is Su Fang Ng, professor of English and Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England <\/em>(Cambridge UP 2007); Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance<\/em> (Oxford UP 2019), and a Cambridge Element on Writing About Discovery in the Early Modern East Indies<\/em> (Cambridge UP 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surveying the East: Cartographic Poetics from Spenser to Milton<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poly-Olbion <\/em>(1613), Michael Drayton\u2019s poetic chorography of English counties, which replicates in verse what Christopher Saxton\u2019s An Atlas of England and Wales <\/em>(1579) achieved in maps, includes a surprising digression: an extended passage on the first mission to India, describing their route from Tripolis to Melaka, \u201cMeasuring with many a step, the great East-Indian <\/em>wast.\u201d Why does the East loom large in geographically-inflected English Renaissance literature? Asia\u2019s importance is two-fold. First, global trade focused on the cloves and nutmeg-producing Spice Islands known as the Moluccas. Second, the East was believed to be Eden\u2019s location. England sought not colonization in Asia but trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Examining the place of Asia in early modern England, these lectures investigate how cartographic surveying became poetic techniques for a Renaissance globalism. English spatial imaginary emphasized connected spaces to locate England in the larger world. Spenser makes fairyland India and America. Looking to Marlowe, Milton invokes the Central Asian conqueror Tamburlaine. And Margaret Cavendish creates a polar paradise to mirror the present world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Representing space as relational, English cartographic poetics bridges the gap between England and the East through images of parallelism, juxtapositions, and palimpsestic overlap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All talks begin 6pm<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

April 21<\/strong>: \u201cSpenser\u2019s Map of Fairyland,\u201d Gilman 308<\/p>\n\n\n\n

April 22<\/strong>: \u201cMilton, Marlowe, and Imperial Cartography,\u201d Gilman 300<\/p>\n\n\n\n

April 23<\/strong>: \u201cMargaret Cavendish’s Speculative Worlds,\u201d Gilman 300<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"1570<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum <\/em>(Antwerp, 1570), plate between pp. 48 and 49, Library of Congress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Charles S. Singleton Center Distinguished Lecturer for 2026 is Su Fang Ng, professor of English and Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP 2007); Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford UP 2019), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":768,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/768"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1218,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions\/1218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/singleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}