Join the UB Humanities Institute for the first talk of 2023–2024 season of Scholars@Hallwalls. Complimentary light fare and wine precede each of the monthly talks held in the cinema space at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

In recent decades, humanists have asked how societies deliver basic amenities like potable water, rapid transit, waste disposal, and on-demand light. My talk traces the conceptual roots of infrastructure to the early modern world. Long before “infrastructure” entered the French then English vernaculars, the 16-century theological doctrine of public works compelled collective life through acts of earthmoving, architecture, performance, and charity. I investigate the writings that authorized land use for the common good, and show how their language continues to predict built environments today.

David Alff researches the 18-century Anglophone world. His work has appeared recently in the journals Critical Inquiry and English Literary History, various academic essay collections, and popular venues like The Washington Post, The Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Alff is currently writing a monograph, “Rights of Way: A Literary Approach to Infrastructure.” His new book, The Northeast Corridor, is coming out from the University of Chicago Press in March 2024. Corridor is the first biography of America’s most important railroad. It shows how trains make the places that make us.