A Talk by Professor Dorothy Wang
Thursday, December 13, 1:30-3pm
Wennan Building, Room 204
This talk will discuss the influence of British colonialism on English-language poetics, especially its must foundational concepts, and the possibilities for broadening the notion of English poetry to include poetries by minorities in the UK and those writing in English in places besides the UK and the United States.
Dorothy Wang is a Professor in Williams College's American Studies Program and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of English, specializing in contemporary English-language poetry (particularly minority experimental poetry) and poetics, with subsidiary research interests in Anglophone Chinese disaporic literature and in American studies.
Her book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013) received the Association for Asian American Studies' award for best book of literary criticism in 2016 and was chosen by Ben Lerner for The New Yorker's list of "The Books We Loved in 2016." It also garnered honorable mention in the Poetry Foundation's inaugural Pegasus Awards for Criticism in 2014. The first national conference on race and creative writing in the United States was named after Thinking Its Presence and was convened in 2014 and 2015 at the University of Montana and in 2017 at the University of Arizona.
Wang conceived of and co-founded the "Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK" (RAPAPUK) research initiative, based in the UK, which will hold its second conference, "Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK: Legacies of Colonialism," at Queens' College, Cambridge University, from Oct. 27-28, 2018. She has also published criticism on Asian Australian literature.
Sponsored by the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures and the Institute for World Literatures & Cultures.
