Keegan C. Finberg to deliver Drake Lecture – February 27
Friday, February 27
2:00 – 3:00 PM
Divinity 127
“Reproduction and Generality: Feminist Diets in Poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin”
This talk will examine feminist performance art and poetry that experiments with food intake to consider effects of the political economic welfare conditions of the 1970s. Speaking directly to the tightening of food assistance and health care service in the US, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, and Eleanor Antin use constraint as a public form to center hunger as resistance. These experiments can be seen as part of a trajectory of artwork that expands what we consider poetry and how we think about the public good.
Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant profess or English and affiliated faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country. Her first book of criticism, Poetry in General, How a Literary Form Became Public, about the transformation of the welfare state in the United States after 1960, was just published by Columbia University Press. Her next book will be about the changing state surveillance culture, poetic forms, and myths about the family. Her academic essays about poetry, urban space, and queer practice have been published in Textual Practice and Canada and Beyond, and her public scholarship has appeared in Jacket2, The Rumpus, The Believer, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry chapbook, The Thought of Preservation (Ursus Americanus Press 2019), considers the language of polite racism and misogyny in online social forums for neighborhoods undergoing gentrification.
The event is part of the Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series.