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Professor Vimala Pasupathi decided to stay very topical with her recent lecture related to the Alexiad. In her lecture entitled “Up Close & From a Distance”, Pasupathi begins by showing a music video from an artist named M.I.A. This beginning of the lecture and what comes after are what really got me interested as I was watching it from home. As my blog title suggests, I focus mainly on borders. When Pasupathi mentioned M.I.A’s song which is named Borders, I was lowkey ecstatic. Now to speak a little about M.I.A, she is an immigrant that is banned from over 30 countries! It’s highly ironic that an artist with a song named borders is being held back from crossing over those borders. Immigration has been a heavily disputed topic as of late and I had no idea who M.I.A was until the lecture, but I am impressed by her dedication to speaking out. Pasupathi’s reason for speaking on M.I.A. was to tie into the fact that the Alexiad was written by a woman, something that is severely lacking within the course syllabus for C&E. Now I’m not going to lie, I did not see this as big of a deal as she did, but I understand where she is coming from. Not being represented is painful and annoying. It is even more annoying when you’re very own leader, our president, tends to speak out against some of your people. I just don’t get why Donald Trump feels the constant need to degrade and block off others. In a way, instead of trying to take down borders, Donald Trump is dead set on building more and more border both figuratively and physically. But I digress. Back on topic, Professor Pasupathi is clearly very into social media and staying consistently on topic with what is going on. One thing that caught my attention along with this is the fact that professor Pasupathi used an insane amount of tweets to prove her points. She uses Twitter even more than I do! She has so many on-topic tweets and essays to guide us with. It’s just really impressive how easily she was able to capture my attention. Regarding the Alexiad, it was very monumental in a way regarding speaking up for women. Very rarely were women taken seriously back then, but the Alexiad is one of the most famous works from that era. The most ironic thing I came to while listening to Pasupathi talk was the fact that the Alexiad is being taken more seriously than some of the speak on women’s rights nowadays.

Works Cited:

Pasupathi, Vimala C. “The Alexiad Lecture – Vimala C. Pasupathi – Medium.” Medium.com, Medium, 20 Nov. 2018, medium.com/@engvcp/the-alexiad-lecture-82ac016bdfde.

Pasupathi, Vimala. “Up Close & From a Distance.” HUHC. HUHC Lecture, 20 Nov. 2018, Hempstead, Hofstra University.