tgiFHI | Julianne Werlin, "Death of the Writer, Life of the Author: From Mortality Statistics to Literary Immortality in the English Renaissance"

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

On Friday, November 7, 2025 we will be hosting Julianne Werlin, Associate Professor of English, as the next speaker in the series.

For Renaissance writers, the best reason to compose poetry or to publish books was to cheat the grave. Life was brief and uncertain; death was omnipresent and inevitable. Authorship offered the best chance of immortality on earth: if they wrote well enough, poets could hope to build themselves a literary monument "more lasting than bronze, higher than the pyramids," in the famous lines of Horace. It was an aspiration shared by Shakespeare and Spenser, Herrick and Milton. But the Renaissance proved to be the high point for authorial ambitions of literary immortality. Slowly, authorship ceased to be the pursuit of immortality.

Why?

This talk, drawn from my current project, English Renaissance Authors: A Demographic History, argues that one answer can be found in changing patterns of mortality. Beginning in the seventeenth century, it is possible to see the beginnings of the mortality transition, which would slowly and unevenly change how men and women live and die across the globe. Drawing on research on the life courses of over 600 English literary authors, I suggest that we can see how the timing of their deaths shaped literary culture and notions of authorship in a transitional moment in English literary history.

Julianne Werlin is an associate professor in Duke's department of English. Her first book, Writing at the Origin of Capitalism, appeared in 2021; she is currently at work on a study of 600 English literary writers, entitled English Renaissance Authors: A Demographic History.

RSVP for the date here!