This is a reminder that our third Spatial Humanities Working Group meeting for the semester will take place Tuesday, November 15, from 2-3 p.m. in 1104 Mesa Vista Hall (History Department Common Room). We are excited to have Julie Williams, a PhD Candidate in the English Department and a Bilinski Fellow, present a paper titled, “Creating Space: The Influence of Health and Environment in Literary Walking Philosophies.” Here’s a brief summary:

“Montana author Mary MacLane's “peripatetic philosophy” was influenced by the expansiveness of the Montana landscape in her early work, leading to the radicalism she expressed in her youth. Yet this relationship to the landscape and her hometown, and in turn the social critique offered in her philosophy, changed over the course of her life. I argue that this change can be connected to an illness she experienced in 1910 from which she never fully recovered, leaving her unable to traverse both her inner and outer landscapes. Her relationship with Montana and the iconic Western landscape is complex, as her childhood and young adult years spent in Butte produced not only feelings of loneliness and isolation, but also a sense of freedom from the restrictions normally placed upon women in the early twentieth century.”