Creations: Paradise Lost, the Popol Vuh, and the Diné Bahane’ in Dialogue

Register by April 14 for this hybrid event.

What happens, what emerges, what is created when the Navajo creation story, the Mayan creation story, and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” are read side by side? University of Chicago professors Edgar Garcia and Tim Harrison will be joined by Paul Zolbrod for a conversation moderated by UIC’s Raffi Magarik that considers these questions and invites the audience to compare specific passages from the three works.

Paul G. Zolbrod is a professor emeritus of English at Allegheny College, and currently lives in New Mexico. He is a scholar, playwright and translator best known for his 1984 translation of the “Diné Bahane’” (the Navajo creation story). He has just finished a book comparing “Paradise Lost” and the “Diné Bahane’” entitled “Paradise Revisited,” which will appear in print later this year.

Edgar Garcia is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography” (Fence Books, 2019), “Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictoraphy, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu” (U Chicago Press, 2020) and, most recently, “Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis” (U Chicago Press, 2022). He is currently working on a creative reworking of the 16th century, Nahuatl-language Cantares Mexicanos.

Timothy Harrison is an associate professor of English and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England: (U Chicago Press,2020) and his John Donne’s “Physics” will be published in 2024. With Edgar Garcia, he co-taught the course “Creations: Popol Vuh and Paradise Lost” at the University of Chicago.

Raffi Magarik is an asistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. He has published articles on Milton and is the author of “The Fictional Bible in the English Renaissance,” forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.