{"id":866,"date":"2020-10-23T19:25:54","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T19:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/?page_id=866"},"modified":"2026-05-14T19:25:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T19:25:50","slug":"harold-stirling-vanderbilt-lectures","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/harold-stirling-vanderbilt-lectures\/","title":{"rendered":"Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Lectures"},"content":{"rendered":"

About the Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Lecture Series<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 year, 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.<\/p>\n

2025<\/h2>\n

Nomi Stone<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Friday, November 14 | 12:30 – 2:30 PM | Kissam C216<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"image\u201cUnvestigative Poetics\u201d<\/em><\/strong>: Near and Far in the Hebrides<\/strong><\/p>\n

What might it look like to combine \u201cthe poetics of bewilderment\u201d 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\u00a0and 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<\/em> in her current work.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 The room seems to rise out of nothing on a dark rainy day like today: lit lushly against the black sea of the moor.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\"image<\/p>\n

Nomi Stone<\/strong> is an award-winning poet and anthropologist. Author of two full-length poetry collections, Stranger\u2019s Notebook <\/em><\/a>(TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class <\/em><\/a>(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<\/em><\/a> (University of California Press, 2022), was a finalist for the Atelier Prize.<\/p>\n

Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright, Stone\u2019s poems appear in POETRY Magazine<\/em>, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Nation,The New Republic, The Atlantic,\u00a0<\/em>and widely elsewhere. Her anthropological articles have been published in Cultural Anthropology <\/em>and American Ethnologist. <\/em>\u00a0A section from her third collection of poetry, a hybrid collection about queer kinship, You Could Build a World This Way<\/em>, was a finalist for the Bull City Press\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Past Lectures<\/h2>\n