Scholars@Hallwalls is a monthly series featuring talks by Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows. Please join us in the cinema space at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center!

Complimentary wine and light fare will be served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session at this free and open-to-the-public event.

“Rights of Way: A Literary Approach to Infrastructure”

In recent decades, humanists have asked how societies deliver basic amenities like potable water, rapid transit, waste disposal, and on-demand light. My talk traces the conceptual roots of infrastructure to the early modern world. Long before “infrastructure” entered the French then English vernaculars, the sixteenth-century theological doctrine of public works compelled collective life through acts of earthmoving, architecture, performance, and charity. I investigate the writings that authorized land use for the common good, and show how their language continues to predict built environments today.

This event will be simultaneously live-streamed via the Hallwalls website. The talk will begin at ~4:15pm.

About David Alff, Associate Professor of English

David Alff researches the eighteenth-century Anglophone world. His work has appeared recently in the journals Critical Inquiry and English Literary History, various academic essay collections, and popular venues like The Washington Post, The Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Alff is currently writing a monograph, “Rights of Way: A Literary Approach to Infrastructure.” His new book, The Northeast Corridor, is coming out from the University of Chicago Press in March 2024. Corridor is the first biography of America’s most important railroad. It shows how trains make the places that make us.