Contemporary Poetics, Communities, and Publics
Inaugural European Association of American Studies Poetry Network Symposium
University of Göttingen | May 16-17, 2025

How does poetry circulate within or through contemporary everyday spaces, and how do networks of poets, publishers, and readers inform its evolving role in public discourse? This inaugural EAAS Poetry Network symposium aims to examine poetry not as an individual expression but as a collaborative practice deeply embedded in collective experience. By exploring how poetry engages public spaces, we also hope to address questions of accessibility, inclusivity, and to redress the boundaries of poetic form.

This symposium invites the full range of poetry in a contemporary sense, which includes its publics and expands a definition of the lyric “I”. We contend our task as scholars to involve reimagining and enabling relations between poets and their readers. This requires approaching poetry as a sphere of collaboration and dialogue, while understanding sociability and networks as historically central to even the most personal and subjective poetic voices. Our work thus aims to look outwards, towards the civic and communal, where a definition of poetry is constantly being renewed as it exists in a generative relationship with its readers and the places they occupy and create.

We invite papers on the following topics, which are suggested but not limited to:

• Poetry and civic space
• Poetry’s Peoples
• Letters between poets/digital networks between poets
• Readerships and audiences
• Poetry As… (e.g., Resistance; Public Voice; Politics)
• Poetry in (response to) crisis (e.g., climate crisis; international war)
• Poetry and race
• Poetry festivals
• Poetry awards
• Revising, editing, interviewing, mentoring 
• Poetry presses, pamphlets, and magazines
• Poetry’s relationship to other literary forms
• Poetry and medium
• Poetry and archive
• Poetry and translation

The symposium welcomes proposals from all scholars, poets, and industry professionals, and especially from postgraduates and ECRs. Please submit a 300-word abstract, along with a short bio, to "poetrynetwork.eaas@gmail.com" by 5pm on Friday, December 13th.

Organizers:

• Lucy Cheseldine (University of York)
• Gulsin Ciftci (University of Münster)
• Andrew Gross (University of Göttingen)
• Philip McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast)

As part of our 2023 Juneteenth event, we are happy to announce that our conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton has been published: 

Writing Black Women’s Mythology: A Conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Gulsin Ciftci, and Silvia Schultermandl. You may find it here.

SERIES TITLE: Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference
SERIES EDITORS: May Friedman, Professor; Silvia Schultermandl, Professor

For more information, please look at our series page: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15789

This book series brings together analyses of familial and kin relationships with emerging and new technologies which allow for the creation, maintenance and expansion of family. We use the term “family” as a working truth with a wide range of meanings in an attempt to address the feelings of family belonging across all aspects of social location: ability, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, body size, social class and beyond. This book series aims to explore phenomena located at the intersection of technologies including those which allow for family creation, migration, communication, reunion and the family as a site of difference. The individual volumes in this series will offer insightful analyses of these phenomena in media, social media, literature, popular culture and corporeal settings.

Possible book topics include:

• the use of technology and migration and family composition and disjunction;
• the ways that technologies may both push and pull kin together/apart;
• the range of technology use across literal and figurative space including intersections of geography, race, age, poverty, gender and beyond;
• the impact of technological absence: the ways that technologies may be taken for granted in particular environments (privileged nations; privileged subject positions) and may be denied or inaccessible in other spaces or places;
• technologies of family creation and maintenance: the use of alternate reproductive technologies; the use of communication technologies to share information;
• discussions of race and racialization in the context of kinship relationships and intersected with connections to technologies; hypervisibility of racism including police brutality; activist circles as forms of kinship;
• queer family creation and representation through technology; making queer family visible through traditional, popular and social media; alternate family connections including non-normative parenting arrangements (more than two parents, multiple different shades of parenting); “new” family through donor sibling relationships;
• technologies of class mobility, including the impact of smartphone technology on mediating/curtailing aspects of the digital divide; shifting family relationships through generational moves in class status;
• fat family: the ways that narratives of obesity have had impacts on the creation and representation of family (for example: obese women who are denied reproductive technologies or access to international adoption); the ways these rhetorics have shifted differently in different jurisdictions; representation of fat family; intersection of fat and working class identities in popular culture;
• trans families: both in terms of gender identity but also in terms of other families that “confound”— families that do not “match” one another, or that otherwise transgress normative models;
• technologies of disability: the use of technology to enhance or bolster independence, the ways that disabled people are seen as incapable of parenting; on the other hand, the technologies which come into play around parenting children with disability, both prenatally and once children are born; representation of disability and family (fetishization and the perceived martyrdom of parents).

Please send inquiries to: mayfriedman@torontomu.ca AND silvia.schultermandl@uni-muenster.de