2026 Rackin Lecture with Dr. Erin Murphy

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Erin Murphy from Boston University for this year's Phyllis Rackin Lecture.

Zombies, Martyrs, and Submarines: Margaret Cavendish’s Soldiers and the “Right Owner” of the Body

In Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, she imagines an army of reanimated corpses. With this bizarre and haunting hypothetical, Cavendish explicitly explores the question of who is the “right owner” of a body. As she represents soldiers across her oeuvre, from her martyred brother to her triumphant female warriors, she returns to these questions of what happens to bodies at war, and the relation between vulnerability and power. This talk argues that war is an epistemological and political lens as significant to Cavendish’s work as the New Science. Her interweaving of embodiment and emergent military technologies, fact and fiction, points beyond considerations of Cavendish’s royalist allegiance or her supposed pacifism to what might best be understood as the somatechnics of war.

The Phyllis Rackin Lecture

The Phyllis Rackin lecture was established to honor Phyllis Rackin, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania and her groundbreaking work in the fields of both feminist scholarship and Early Modern studies. A former President of the Shakespeare Association of America, she has published numerous scholarly articles on Shakespeare and related subjects in anthologies and in such journals as PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. She has also published four books on Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Tragedies; Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles; and Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, which she wrote in collaboration with Professor Jean Howard of Columbia University; and Shakespeare and Women. Her awards include an ACLS fellowship and a Lindback award for distinguished teaching.

This annual lecture is made possible thanks the generous support of the English Department, the Medieval-Renaissance Studies Working Group, and the FQT/GSWS Center.