You're So Money: Literary and Economic Seductions - lecture by Sarah SkwireOctober 23, 2014 at 4:45–6 p.m.

The Inaugural Lecture of the Gustavus Workshop in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
Thursday, October 23rd at 5 p.m. in Beck Hall 101 (pizza will be served at 4:45)
You're So Money: Literary and Economic Seductions.

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has led many to believe that the early modern world had an unrelievedly negative view of money-lending and an unsophisticated view of economics. But The Merchant of Venice is only part of the story about Shakespeare's views on exchange and commerce. Reading his love sonnets and putting them into the context of other early modern seduction poems shows us a much more complicated--and even enthusiastically positive--image of early modern thinking about economics. Through erotic punning and word play, Shakespeare and his contemporaries invite us into a world where pleasure is a profit and profit is a pleasure.

Sarah Skwire is a Fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc., a non-profit educational foundation and the author of the college writing textbook, Writing with a Thesis, which is in its 12th edition. Sarah has published a range of academic articles on subjects from Shakespeare to zombies and the broken window fallacy, and her work has appeared in journals as varied as Literature and Medicine, The George Herbert Journal, and The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. She writes a regular column, Book Value, for the Freeman Online and blogs at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Sarah's work on literature and economics has also appeared in the Freeman and in Cato Unbound, and she is an occasional lecturer for IHS, SFL, and other organizations. Her poetry has appeared, among other places, in Standpoint, TheNew Criterion, and The Vocabula Review. She graduated with honors in English from Wesleyan University, and earned a MA and PhD in English from the University of Chicago.