CONWAY, Ark. (March 29, 2016) – Hendrix College English professor Dr. Debapriya Sarkar recently received one of five long-term fellowships at the
Folger Institute, a center for research in early modern humanities at the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
The fellowship, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will support Sarkar’s book-project titled Possible
Knowledge: Forms of Literary and Scientific Thought in Early Modern England.
“Speculative habits of thought—from hypothesis and conjecture to prophecy and prediction – were at the core of Renaissance poetics, fascinating writers from Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare to Milton and Cavendish,” Sarkar said. “I call these ways of thinking ‘possible knowledge,’ and I use them to
show how literary writing helped to address epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution.”
“Literary techniques modeled new ways of exploring relations that were foundational to Renaissance thought: between words and things, for instance, or between form and matter, or even between self and world,” she said. “By engaging with scholarship not only in literary studies, but also in philosophy and the
history of science, I aim to trace the continued importance of these imaginative techniques in the modern disciplines of the humanities and the sciences.”
In the fall, Sarkar received the
2015 Schachterle Essay Prize
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts for her essay titled “‘Sad Experiment’ in Paradise Lost: Epic Knowledge and Evental Poetics,” which appeared in Exemplaria:
A Journal of Theory in Medieval & Renaissance Studies. Sarkar also received
the 2015 J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America for “Possible Knowledge: Forms of Literary and Scientific Thought in Early Modern England,” her Ph.D. dissertation from Rutgers University.
About Hendrix College
Hendrix College is a private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas. Founded in 1876 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884, Hendrix is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That
Will Change the Way You Think about Collegesand is nationally recognized in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings for academic quality, community, innovation, and value. For more information, visit
www.hendrix.edu.