Keynote speakers

Clive Wilmer (University of Cambridge)

Clive Wilmer is a poet, translator, critic and lecturer. He has published eight volumes of poetry, including his New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012) and Urban Pastorals (Worple, 2014). He has also published eight volumes of poetry translated from Hungarian in collaboration with George Gömöri. He has written for many periodicals, including PN Review and the Times Literary Supplement. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, an Honorary Patron of the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, an Honorary Fellow of Anglia Ruskin University and an Anniversary Fellow of Whitelands College, Roehampton University. He is an enthusiastic admirer of the work of John Ruskin, on whom he has written extensively, and from 2009-2019 was Master of Ruskin’s charity, the Guild of St George.

https://complit.fas.harvard.edu/people/martin-puchner

“Winter Frosts: The Achievement of Christina Rossetti”

November 10th, 2022 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom)

Roxana Preda (University of Edinburgh)

Roxana Preda is Researcher and Associate Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is specialized in modernist poetry and particularly in the work of the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). She is the author of (Post)modern Ezra Pound (2001) and Professional Attention: Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism (2018). She is the editor of Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence 1933-1940 (2007) and the Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (2019). She is also the founder, first editor, and publisher of the Pound digital periodical Make It New (2014-). Her work in progress is a academic website focused on Ezra Pound’s major poem The Cantos, designed to aid the study of this monument of Anglo-American modernism. It is called The Cantos Project and can be found at this address: http://ezrapoundcantos.org.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-roxana-preda 

“Ezra Pound’s Cantos and China”

November 23th, 2022 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).

Michael Alexander (University of St. Andrews)

Michael Alexander held the Chair of English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland from 1985 to 2003. Previously he had held positions at the Universities of Stirling and EastAnglia, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, and of Melbourne in Australia. Hewas educated at Downside School and the Universities of Oxford, Perugia and Princeton, andworked in publishing firms in London and New York. He is a poet: his verse translations of Old English poetry for Penguin Books – The First Poems in English and Beowulf – have sold a million copies. He has written on Chaucer and on modern poetry. His best-known books are A History of English Literature, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England and Reading Shakespeare. He has lectured for the British Council in Australia, Italy and Spain, and has often broadcast on the BBC.

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/mja4

«The Victorian Poets: A Multiplicity of Voices”

November 29th, 2022 – 17:00 (CET),  online (Zoom).

Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University)

Before her retirement, Marjorie Perloff was Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. She has taught courses and writes on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts and, more recently, on Austrian literature between the two World Wars, especially on Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994, available in Spanish translation), and subsequent books (15 in all), the most recent of which are Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2011), which appeared in Portuguese translation in 2013, and Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (2016, 2018 paper).  Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992) has been used in classrooms studying the “new” digital poetics (and in Chinese translation won an award for best criticism), and 21^st Century Modernism (Blackwell 2002) is a manifesto of Modernist Survival.   Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996) brought philosophy into the mix; it has recently been translated into Portuguese (Sao Paulo), Spanish (Mexico), and Slovenian.  In 2019, the U of New Mexico Press will publish Circling the Canon: The Selected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff, 2 Volumes: Vol. 1-1969-96, Vol. 2, 1997-2016.

Marjorie Perloff has also published a cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has recently appeared in German translation in Vienna (Paradoxien einer Emigration, Praesens Verlag) and has been translated into Portuguese in Brazil.    The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, co-edited with Craig Dworkin was published by Chicago in 2009.  A collection of interviews, Poetics in a New Key was published by Chicago in the fall of 2014.

Perloff has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from the TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. In 2009, she was the Weidenfeld Professor of European Literature at Oxford University and in 2016, the first Wittgenstein Distinguished Professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.  She is currently Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.

Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and was President of the Modern Language Association in 2006.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University.  She received an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters, from Bard College in May 2008, from Chapman University in 2015, and the University of Innsbruck.   In 2012, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania honored her with a special symposium; a varied set of the individual contributions to that symposium appeared in the online journal Jacket 2.

Marjorie Perloff recently participated in a film called “The Class of 1938:  Exile and Excellence,” in which sixteen distinguished emigrés from Hitler’s Vienna are interviewed about their experience.  The two films—the whole group and Perloff interview—are available on You Tube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECoADwIBVXo&t=35s

http://marjorieperloff.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Perloff

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marjorie-perloff

https://english.stanford.edu/people/marjorie-perloff

“’Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors’: Rereading T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion»

December 1st, 2022 – 18:00 (CET), online (Zoom).

Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson has been published in thirty-seven languages and has just received two major European prizes: the Naim Frasheri Laureateship 2019 and the European Lyric Atlas Prize 2020. She has also received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia), the Charles Angoff Award (US), the 2016 Slovo Podgrmec Prize and the 2015 Povelji za međunarodnu saradnju Award (Bosnia) and the Aark Arts International Poetry Prize (India), and been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women Poets. She received an MBE for services to literature in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours, 2017.

Sampson is a Fellow and former Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the English Association, the Higher Education Association and the Wordsworth Trust, and the Patron of the Anglo-Russian Cultural Institute and of Living Words. Her publications include twenty-nine volumes of poetry, literary non-fiction and criticism; she has also co-translated four volumes of poetry and developed a specialism in contemporary poetry in translation. She has received the Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors, a number of Writer’s Awards from both the English and the Welsh Arts Councils, and various Poetry Book Society commendations, and has been shortlisted twice for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prizes.

Among Sampson’s recent books, the Spectator called her exploration of Limestone Country (2017) ‘bewitching’, and it was a Guardian Book of the Year and a Telegraph and Evening Standard Pick of the Summer. Her critically acclaimed biography, In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), has appeared in US, Italian and Spanish editions. It was a BBC R4 Book of the Week, Guardian, Daily Mail, Spectator and Idler Book of the Week, Evening Standard London nonfiction bestseller and W.H. Smiths bestseller, Sunday Times Must Read, Observer, Independent and FT Pick for 2018, Times and FT Pick of the Summer, Times, Sunday Times and Mail Paperback Pick, Times Literary Non-fiction Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Best First Biography Award.

Her eighth poetry collection, Come Down, will be published in February 2020 and her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 2021. A former editor of Poetry Review, she holds the Chair of Poetry at the University of Roehampton.

https://www.fionasampson.co.uk 

“’Ah did you once see Shelley plain?’: Memorabilia and other forms of literary influence”

December 12th, 2022 – 16:00 (CET), online (Zoom).

Charles Altieri (University of California at Berkeley)

Charles Altieri holds the Stageberg Chair in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. He is the author of twelve books, including Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism. He teaches in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are a paperback edition of Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry and Subjective Agency (1994). He is now writing a book on contemporary poetry and beginning a project attempting to use classical aesthetics for contemporary concerns. Here is list of his books:

• Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Anglo-American Poetry. Chicago: AHM Publishing Corp., Spring, 1979.
• Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, Spring 1979.
• Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.
• Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Paperback: Penn State Press, 1994.
• Canons and Consequences. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
• Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications. Oxford: Blackwells, 1994.
• Postmodernism Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998.
• The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
• The Art of Modern American Poetry. Oxford. Blackwells, 2005.
• Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013

https://english.berkeley.edu/users/9

“Varieties of Lyric Experience: What happens to a mind on poetry”

March, 2023 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).

Leonor Martínez (Universidad de Córdoba)

Leonor María Martínez Serrano is a Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba (Spain). Her research interests include Canadian Literature, American Literature, High Modernism, Ecocriticism, and Comparative Literature. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (Canada), the University of the West of Scotland (UK), the University of Bialystok (Poland) and the University of Oldenburg (Germany). She has co-edited the volume of collected essays Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of a More-than-Human World (Brill, 2021) and authored the monograph Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst (Peter Lang, 2021).

http://www.uco.es/dptos/depfia/es/personal/pdi-inglesa/139-leonor-maria-martinez-serrano-2

“Words of Wisdom: Natalie Rice’s 26 Visions of Light”

February 14th, 2023, 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).

John Gery (University of University of New Orleans)

John Gery is Research Professor of English at University of New Orleans, he directs the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, Brunnenburg, Italy. Since 2005 Gery has served as Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference and is Series Editor for the EPCL Book Series at Clemson University Press.  Of his seven collections of poetry include The Enemies of Leisure, Davenport’s Version, A Gallery of Ghosts, and Have at You Now!. His work has appeared in journals worldwide and has been translated into eight languages. Gery has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and others. He has published criticism on poets from Ezra Pound to Marilyn Chin, including his book, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness. He has also co-authored a guidebook on Pound’s Venice and a biography of Armenian poet, Hmayeak Shems. In addition, he has co-edited three collections of criticism on Pound and Modernism, as well as numerous books of poetry, and he has worked as a collaborative translator from Armenian, Serbian, Chinese, Italian, and French.

https://www.uno.edu/profile/faculty/john_gery-0

“Postmodern American Poetry, 1950-2000”

May 10th, 2023 – 17:00 (CET), online (Zoom).