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Department of English

closeup of a statue of Harold Stirling Vanderbilt with trees in the background, located on the Vanderbilt campus

Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Lectures

About the Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Lecture Series

The annual Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Lecture Series is named for the great-grandson of Vanderbilt University founder Cornelius Vanderbilt. Harold Vanderbilt was a longtime member of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust and served as its president from 1955 to 1968.

The lecture series is designed to spark conversations about new scholarship in literature and creative writing while also contributing to graduate student career development. Each fall, English department graduate students invite a prominent, early-career scholar to the Vanderbilt campus. The honoree leads a two-day sequence of events, including career-oriented graduate workshops, a public lecture on the honoree’s research, and outings with students.

2025 Lecture

Friday, November 14th, 12:30 – 2:30 PM

Kissam C216

image of the Hebrides“Unvestigative Poetics”: Near and Far in the Hebrides

What might it look like to combine “the poetics of bewilderment” with ethnographic practice? In this experimental talk, the poet and anthropologist, Nomi Stone plays across epistemologies as she shares the earliest research and writing stages of a new book project and its methodological possibilities. Reflecting first on the investigative poetics which inflected her last two books (an ethnography and a collection of poetry, respectively) she proposes and enacts what she calls an unvestigative poetics in her current work.

Moving between questions of mystery and agency between language and maker; inquiries into contemporary poetry, poetics, and pedagogy; and fieldwork about empire, remoteness, community, and love, in the Hebrides off the West Coast of Scotland, this talk invites listeners into its unknowing — The room seems to rise out of nothing on a dark rainy day like today: lit lushly against the black sea of the moor. 

 

image of Nomi Stone

Nomi Stone is an award-winning poet and anthropologist. Author of two full-length poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo 2019), a finalist for the Julie Suk Award, based on two years of fieldwork she conducted across the Middle East and America. Her first academic monograph, Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2022), was a finalist for the Atelier Prize.

 

Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright, Stone’s poems appear in POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Nation,The New Republic, The Atlantic, and widely elsewhere. Her anthropological articles have been published in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist.  A section from her third collection of poetry, a hybrid collection about queer kinship, You Could Build a World This Way, was a finalist for the Bull City Press’s chapbook prize, the Chad Walsh Prize, and the Tomasz Salamun Prize. Stone holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. She was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University, where she taught across the Anthropology and Creative Writing program. She is currently Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Dallas.

images of Nomi Stone's books

Past Lectures

  • Professor Amrita Ghosh, University of Central Florida: “Colonial-Racial Modernity, Citizenship, and India’s Cultural Productions” (Fall 2024)
  • Professor Joseph Albernaz, Columbia University: “Fallen Light: Infernal Energy from Blake to Bataille” (Fall 2023)
  • Professor Elleza Kelley, Yale University: “Train Songs: An Echolocology” (Spring 2023)
  • Professor Cristin Ellis, University of Mississippi: “Vegetal Sexuality in Thoreau: Toward an Ecoerotics” (2022)
  • Professor Emily Steinlight, University of Pennsylvania: “The Hidden Zone of Aesthetic Production: Fin de Siècle Fiction and the Afterlives of Autonomy” (2019)
  • Professor La Marr Jurelle Bruce, University of Maryland, College Park: “How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Toward a Mad Methodology” (2018)
  • Professor Mathias Nilges, St. Francis Xavier University: “The Novel of the Long Now” (2017)
  • Professor Sami Schalk, State University of New York, Albany: “Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Deconstruction of Able-Mindedness” (2016)
  • Professor Soyica Colbert, Georgetown University: “Framing Black Women’s Performance: Venus, Beyonce, and The Couple in the Cage” (2015)
  • Professor Eve Dunbar, Vassar College:  “Monstrous Work:  Zora Neale Hurston, Zombies, and the Art of Critiquing the Academy” (2014)