Poetry and the Choreography of the Body
Description
This seminar warmly invites papers exploring the postures of the human figure as they appear in poetry. By posture, we mean the shapes bodies can take. Whether entwined, taking a knee, lying prone, gesturing, leaping, or with hands clasped in devotion or grief, postures are historically and culturally variable as well as intensely resonant--especially those drawn upon by poets. In poetry, so close to dance and its vocabulary of attitude, posture may be conveyed by means of imagery, rhetorical stance, voice or tone, scripts for the reader’s movements, and more.
We want to make room for papers that explore the spectrum of cultural valences of the human form: the relationship of figural poses to action, dominance, habitus, theatricality, spatial orientation, social relations. After all, postures can enforce hierarchies and they can also resist them. The ability to stand tall may constitute the privileged perspective of the overseer, but it may also be how to get up, to stand up for human rights. As scholarship in disability studies would suggest, postures’ received meanings may seem fixed but their lived embodiment is not: disability and nondisability change over a lifetime. From phenomenological approaches to spatiality studies, affect theory to performance studies, what are the affordances of such tensions? What are their limitations? Recent attention to poetic form and embodiment by Sarah Dowling—on figuration and recumbency—and Alex C. Purves—on gesture in Homer—suggests the range of possible poetic objects and as well as the seminar’s timeliness. We look forward to receiving proposals on poetry and poetics across a wide spectrum of time periods, traditions, schools, forms, and national literatures.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Paula Cucurella is a Chilean poet, translator, and scholar with a PhD in Comparative Literature (SUNY Buffalo) and a forthcoming PhD in Hispanic Studies (UC Riverside). Her research develops the concepts of “affective archives” and somatic indexing in Chilean women’s poetry under dictatorship. She is the author of two poetry books and a critical essay on censorship and Nicanor Parra, and her poems, translations, and essays appear in Latin American and U.S. journals.
Speaker Bio
Carmen Faye Mathes is associate professor of English at McGill University, Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She is the author of Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation (SUP 2022) and has published articles in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Studies in Romanticism and elsewhere. Her current book project explores embodied postures of activist address in Romantic poetry and other media, including objects of material culture and visual art.
Speaker Bio
Xiaoyu Xia is an assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at Princeton University. She is finishing up her first book manuscript, currently titled Reading Between the Lines: Typography and Chinese Literary Modernity (1895-1937). She has also embarked on a second book, unearthing a co-constitutive relationship between typography and prosody in the transformations of Chinese poetic traditions over the long twentieth century.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Matthew Kilbane is the Glynn Family Honors Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), and the editor of Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures (Amherst College Press, 2025).
Speaker Bio
Murphy researches multimedia cultural memory with a focus on the culture and technology of the early twentieth century. She is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her work has appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Her collection, EnTwine: Creative and Critical Teaching with Twine, is forthcoming with Amherst College Press in 2026.
McLeod is an Assistant Professor, LTA, at Concordia University. She is the PI for her SSHRC-funded project "Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research” and her research on poetry and performance has been published in Canadian Literature and Feminist Modernist Studies. Most recently she co-edited with Jason Camlot a special triple-issue of English Studies in Canada "New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies" and she is the co-host of the podcast Literary Listening.
Speaker Bio
Steven Maye teaches in the Writing and Literature program at Capilano University. He holds a PhD in English from The University of Chicago, and is a former Poetry Editor of Chicago Review.
Speaker Bio
Claire Massy-Paoli is a PhD student in French&Italian at Princeton University. A former student of the ENS, she had a first experience as a Junior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. In between French theory and aesthetics, her interdisciplinary approach initially focused on music, specifically on Proust Christian Gailly. Her dissertation project now turns to contemporary dance, examining choreographies in the 20th century. She is also a literary and performing arts critic.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Celia Carrasco Gil is a Predoctoral Fellow of the Ramón Areces Foundation who studies a PhD in Hispanic Studies at Western University and a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Zaragoza. Her research focuses on Contemporary Poetry and Cognitive Poetics, and she is a member of the Abyssal Margin Literary Research Laboratory (University of Zaragoza), the CulturePlex Lab (Western University) and the Literary Theory and Comparative Literature journal Tropelías.
Speaker Bio
Sreemoyee (she/her) is a third-year PhD student at Brandeis University, and has an M.Phil in Children’s Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She is interested in contemporary elegy, medical humanities, and graphic medicine. Other than her research, she enjoys pottery – handbuilding vases and writing poems on them, and cartooning about mental health.
Speaker Bio
Tara M. Holman is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, where she teaches on African American Literature and Culture. In her research, she explores the relationship between form and kinship in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black poetry, performance, and visual culture. She thinks with scholars across the fields of black feminisms, race and aesthetics, visual culture studies, and queer performance thought.
Speaker Bio
Professor of English, University of Virginia; architect; author of Poetry and the Built Environment: A Theory of the Flesh of Art (Oxford, 2024).