Name: Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture: “The Women on the Stairs: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity”
Start: 2025-09-30T15:30:00-04:00
Location: 314 Allen Building, Duke University West Campus

$Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture: \u201cThe Women on the Stairs: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity\u201d$

Duke English invites you to join us for the third annual Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture featuring guest speaker Nathan K. Hensley, Professor of English at Georgetown University. He will present “The Women on the Stairs: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity.”
Professor Hensley earned his PhD here at Duke University and was a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. In 2020, Georgetown awarded him the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. His work focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, environmental humanities, critical theory, and the novel, as well as research in Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization.
Abstract:
“What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? In this lecture, Nathan K. Hensley draws on his new book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (Chicago, 2025), to propose three categories for making change when altering the course of events feels impossible. Focusing on paintings of an extraction-scarred Jamaica by iterant watercolorist William Berryman and tiny verse fragments by Emily Brontë, Hensley shows how these and other nineteenth-century thinkers construed revolution in a minor key: they rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. Turning away from logical proofs and direct argumentation, they instead called on aesthetic technologies and figural strategies, finding scope for change not at the level of the theme or thesis but in small movements of hand and mind. Focusing on these tiny disruptions helps suggest how close attention to Victorian literature can recover a prehistory for the deeply felt sense of powerlessness many of us know all too well today and begin charting ways out.”
This lecture series was established to honor Professor Leonard Tennenhouse, who retired at the end of the 2022 Fall semester and his wife, Professor Nancy Armstrong, who retired during the 2023 academic year. This lecture series is a token of the department’s appreciation for their years of service to the Duke English Department.