Situating Lyric Conference at BU
WLL hosted a major international conference at BU from June 7-11, 2017 on the study of poetry, called “Situating Lyric.” The five-day conference was an unprecedented gathering of many leading lights of poetry studies today, including Jonathan Culler, Virginia Jackson, Jahan Ramazani, Richard Eldridge, Charles Altieri, Stephen Burt, Haun Saussy, Elizabeth Helsinger, Robert von Hallberg, Stephen Owen, Heather Dubrow, and Marion Thain, as well as Eva Zettelmann from Vienna, Dominique Rabaté from Paris, Thomas Austenfeld, Ralph Müller and Tom Kindt from Fribourg, Antonio Rodriguez from Lausanne, Klaus Hempfer from Berlin, numerous scholars from Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, and the UK – along with closer to home, Keith Vincent from WLL, Bonnie Costello from English, Meg Tyler and Joshua Pederson from CGS, and many scholars from nearby institutions. Prof. William Waters organized and hosted the event as the first biennial conference of a scholarly organization he recently co-founded, the International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL). The aim of the conference was to overcome the fragmentation of poetry studies today, where important theoretical advances in different languages, disciplines, and specializations have remained largely invisible to scholars outside each group. By bringing together experts on poetry and poetic traditions in well over a dozen languages and traditions, Europeans and Americans, medievalists and postmodernists, poets, critics and musicians, “Situating Lyric” occasioned robust intellectual exchange across all these boundaries and more.
