The U.S. once viewed Palestine as a domestic place. That will be the focus of the next Geography/Geology/Geohydrology Explorations and Observations (GGGEO) series at 3 p.m. Friday, April 10, in the Felmley Science Annex, room 133.

Molly Robey will present “Domesticating Palestine: Biblical Geography and the American Woman’s Home.” Robey, an assistant professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, will examine how the geography of Palestine was imagined in U.S. culture during the late 19th century. Focusing on the once-popular novel Three Vassar Girls in the Holy Land (1892), Robey will show how Americans came to see Palestine as a domestic space—a space at once feminized and conceptualized as part of the U.S. nation.

This talk, which will situate Three Vassar Girls within a longer history of U.S. representations of Palestine, is sponsored by the Department of Geography and Geology, and the departments of English and history.