Poetry & Poetics Working Group; Anthropocene & Animal Studies Working Group

The Poetry & Poetics Working Group meets roughly once a month in locations around campus. This flexible event series and discussion group focuses especially on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and contemporary critical work in English. We are open to the public and encourage interdisciplinary conversation between poetry and poetics, new media, cinema studies, the sciences, and the arts. Our group is grounded in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, but extends into a larger community of poets, critics, and scholars engaged with contemporary poetics in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

The Anthropocene and Animal Studies Working Group meets once a month, bringing together scholars from different disciplines that are interested in pushing back against the centrality of the human in the humanities. Expanding out toward the realm of the nonhuman, this group aims to bring objects of inquiry into focus that have often been relegated minor: organisms, things, animals, and assemblages. The readings that we discuss do not abandon the human altogether, but to the contrary, examine human embeddedness in the nonhuman world, and how human domination and manipulation of the environment overlaps with other forms of violence that are racial, gendered, and class-driven. We are interested in interrogating the ethical and philosophical implications of the turn to the cosmos, environment, species, and animals in literature, film, social science, and cultural practices.