Thurs., February 7 "Murder as a Fine Art: The Ethics of Crime Fiction"Ruth Morse, Université Paris-Diderot, Sorbonne

Click here for audio recording of the eventSince 1995 Ruth Morse has been professeur des universités at the Université Paris-Diderot. She previously taught at the universities of London, Sussex, Leeds, and Cambridge, where she was director of studies in English at Fitzwilliam College for ten years. She is author or editor of eight books including Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation (2005 [1991]) and Shakespeare, les français, les France (2008) for the Cahiers Charles-V, of which she was general editor for five years. Two additional edited volumes, Continuum Great Shakespeareans vol. XIV (Les Hugo, Pasternak Brecht, and Césaire) as well as Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (with Peter Holland and Helen Cooper), are forthcoming in 2013. Morse is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and a judge for the UK Crime Writers Association.In her talk, Morse will begin from the disdain in which popular genres have often been held and argue that crime fiction at its best has always explored key social and geo-political issues, including international threats such as arms, drugs, labor, money, and prostitution, and, through its conventions, has opened its readers to think about the world's elsewheres, while insisting upon universal moral and ethical ideas.