BARBARA HARLOW: A REMEMBRANCE VIA CONFERENCES, READINGS, AND QUESTIONS

The task of remembering Barbara Harlow is not easy for many reasons, not least among them that she was both formative and formidable to so many, as an example of a committed scholar and colleague, and most certainly as an exacting teacher. What she meant by historicizing involved many things. It was not just a matter of what she called "vulgar empiricism"-the who, what, when, and where of history, all of which she felt were the least any scholar could do-but also of tracking how the pressing questions of a given time were registered in different venues, whether those be in written documents like novels, poems, or trade treaties, or in other arenas like conferences or courts. She thought a great deal about how those questions reemerge and change across time or are forgotten. In other words, Barbara had an uncanny ability to correlate academic and political formations, both to see them as critically engaged with each other rather than as separate realms and to imagine their mutual transformation. If people associate her with political readings of literature, a description far too simplistic for what she wrote, it is also the case that she frequently trained her close reading skills on other forms of writing and, in the process, revealed the genres, leitmotifs, reversals, recognitions, and plot twists that define politics.