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Department of English

Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series

The Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series was established in 2002 in the College of Arts and Science to fund annual lectures in the English Department. The series presents opportunities for students to engage in emerging debates and new methodologies as they hone their research, expand their networks, and gain fresh perspectives from leading scholars and practitioners.

Spring 2026

Keegan C. Finberg

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.

photo of Keegan FinbergKeegan 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.

Selected Previous Lectures

  • Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford, “Being There: The Fiction of the Presence in 18th Century British Theatre & Novels,” 2018
  • Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, “Weak Network: Melville, C.L.R. James, Frank Stella,” 2015
  • Shelby Johnson, “Dreaming Sacagawea,” 2026
  • Soraya Miller, UC Santa Cruz, “Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination, 2025”
  • Mariah Min, Brown University “Desperate Measures Call for Desperate Times: Richard Coer de Lyon and the State of Exception,” 2025
  • Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto, “Literal Reading; or, How to Be Taken in Everything,” 2019
  • Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford, “Such Place, Such Men, Such Language And Such Ware: The Theatre of London’s Fairs,” 2014
  • Elisa Tamarkin, University of California – Berkeley, “Resurrection and Reconstruction,” 2022