During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the diversity of human bodies in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants.

In a free public lecture Tuesday on the UWindsor campus, Valerie Traub will track their implicit taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and class and speculate on the effects of their strategies on the historical emergence of the concept of “the normal.”

Dr. Traub is the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, which won the best book of 2002 award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women; Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama; and most recently, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns.

Her lecture, entitled “Anatomy, Cartography, and the Prehistory of Normality,” is set for 10 a.m. February 23 in the second-floor great room of Canterbury College.