Elegy and Air: 21st Century Politics
Event details
This online event brings together two leading poetics scholars for presentations of new work, readings, and a conversation on the possibilities of poetry today.
Both speakers will address contemporary poetics from distinct yet related angles, exploring how contemporary poetry can memorialise, archive, re-imagine, and interrogate the conditions of the present.
Professor Jahan Ramazani will explore how contemporary elegy defines itself in relation to other genres and media. It examines elegies that befriend, metabolize, and resist memorial forms such as the monument, the obituary, and the photograph.
Professor Zoe Skoulding will read from her latest collection Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? and discuss her recent work on environmental poetics, including the poetics and/of air.
There will be a conversation after the presentations, followed by an audience Q&A.
The event is free but registration is required (link to follow). It is co-hosted with the Modern School.
Zoë Skoulding is a poet and literary critic interested in translation, sound and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. She is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? (Carcanet, 2026), following A Marginal Sea in 2022. Among several prizes and shortlistings, she won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020 for Footnotes to Water (2019) and received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry.
Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (2013), and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020). Her translations include Cosmic Sadness by Jean Portante (Broken Sleep, 2026) and her own work has been widely translated. A selected poems in French, Notes sur l'Eau, is forthcoming from Joca Seria, Paris. A collection of essays on her work, Tongue and Terrain: Zoë Skoulding’s Environmental Poetics, edited by Grzegorz Czemiel and Julia Fiedorczuk, is forthcoming from Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2027.
Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books of criticism on poetry, including, most recently, Poetry in a Global Age (2020); Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and A Transnational Poetics (University of Chicago Press, 2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize for best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010.
Ramazani edited The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2017); is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018, 2024); is an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics (Princeton University Press, 2012); and is the incoming General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and the American Philosophical Society in 2022, Ramazani is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark.