Program in Poetry and Poetics

The Program in Poetry and Poetics brings together a diverse community of literary scholars, poets, and translators working on poetry and poetics across a spectrum of regions, historical periods, and theoretical approaches at the University of Chicago. Our faculty includes experts on classical Chinese poetry, the French avant-garde, the modern reception of archaic Greek poetry, and contemporary British and American writing, to name but a few areas of scholarly interest. Through our ongoing programs and initiatives, we seek to expand the critical understanding of poetics as a field that encompasses not only the study of poetry, but various aspects of literary theory, media studies, and historicist models of inquiry as well. Because many of the faculty members and graduate students presently engaged in the study of poetry and poetics at UChicago are published poets, we also foster work that crosses the border between critical thought and creative practice.
 

We invite you to join us at any of the events that we host during the academic year. Our poetry reading series, Poem Present, brings to the University distinguished contemporary poets such as Simone White, Brandon Shimoda, Susan Stewart, Nathaniel Mackey, and Robert Hass to read from their work. Our scholarly lecture series in partnership with the Department of English Language and Literature, History & Forms of Lyric, has invited visitors such as Andrea Brady, Adriana Jacobs, Liesl Olson, Marjorie Perloff, and Michael Wood to deliver papers on scholarly subjects relating to poetry as well.

The University also hosts the Poetry and Poetics Workshop, a working colloquium for graduate students, scholars, and poets studying poetry both at the university and beyond.

Additionally, the Poetics Program has longstanding ties to our graduate student-run literary journal, Chicago Review, one of the nation’s premier literary journals. 

 

Poetics Committee