Please join us to welcome Professor Emerita Moira Gatens (University of Sydney) for the Annual Sophia Lecture, hosted by the School of Liberal Arts. We will meet at Hemingway's at 4pm for drinks and refreshments, before moving across to 67-101 from 4.30pm for the lecture. All welcome. Please RSVP for catering purposes.
Annual Sophia Lecture: Professor Moira Gatens
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Wollongong Campus
Hemingways and 67-101
Reading George Eliot with Spinoza: Prophecy, Art, and the Transformative Power of Affect
Abstract
George Eliot, author of The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, worked as a translator before turning her hand to fiction. She translated Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics from Latin into English in 1856. Many scholars have argued convincingly that his philosophy had a profound effect on her literary representations of freedom, responsibility and moral character. This is ground that has been extensively mapped. In this lecture, I will venture into comparatively unfrequented territory, aiming to explore the influence that Spinoza’s views on the prophet and prophecy had on Eliot’s understanding of the artist and art. In particular, I am keen to examine their views on the power of affect, or emotion, to alter reality. As well as being intrinsically interesting, this exploration seeks also to challenge lingering historical claims that Spinoza was a ‘mystic’ and that Eliot failed to completely shed her religious beliefs.
Bio
Moira Gatens (FASSA, FAHA) is Emerita Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney. Her interests include early modern philosophy, philosophy and literature, and feminist theory. She is the author of Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Routledge, 1996), Spinoza's Hard Path to Freedom (Royal Van Gorcum, 2011) and Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Polity Press, 1991). She is co-author of Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (Penn State University Press, 2009) and Feminist Ethics (Ashgate, 1998). She is co-editor of Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Embodiment and Affect (Routledge, 2021), The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism (OUP, 1998), and Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Her most recent co-authored book, Spinoza and Art: Literature and the Art of Living will be published in October 2026 with Edinburgh University Press.