Description:

Meredith Martin (English, Princeton University), Jason Rudy (English, University of Maryland, College Park), and Michael Cohen (English, University of California, Los Angeles), three important scholars of nineteenth-century poetics, will present recent work at an afternoon symposium on campus. They represent the Historical Poetics group (historicalpoetics.com), a long-standing scholarly collaboration at a variety of prominent research universities in the US.

Lecture: Michael CohenUniversity of California, Los Angeles
“Taking Poetry to School”
This talk will discuss how the study of poetry came to be at the center of the American public education system during the period of its development at the end of the nineteenth century, and it will examine some of the implications of reading poetry in school in an era of state-sanctioned racial segregation.

Lecture: Meredith Martin
Princeton University
“Poetry’s Metadata”
What do we learn about poems when we read them through how they were taught and understood in the past? How can this knowledge help us think differently about what information poems give us as aesthetic and historical objects, and about the status of “poetry” in culture? Focusing on works in the Princeton Prosody Archive, this talk will explore what it means to put the information we often take for granted as defining what poems are and how they mean (their data: meter, rhyme, figurative language) next to their metadata (how these things were described and discussed, and how the poems were classified, circulated, canonized, found, and lost).

Lecture: Jason Rudy
University of Maryland, College Park
“Burnt Archives: Colonial Power & Indigenous Song”
Because the violence of colonization and dispossession by nature erases Indigenous presence from both the physical land and the historical record, nineteenth-century archives will always be insufficient in accounting for Indigenous peoples. This paper examines absences and misrepresentations in nineteenth-century Australian print culture, focusing in particular on Indigenous song as it was transliterated, translated, and circulated for English-speaking readers.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by May 6 to Simpson Center Events, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu.