Inaugural Professorial Lecture - Professor Jacob Edmond

Poetry and breath: Resuscitating literature, reimagining the world

Hā ki roto, hā ki waho. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s the simplest thing, the in- and outflow of breath that keeps us alive, so automatic that, most of the time, we hardly notice it. And yet we ignore breath at our peril in an era when the struggle to breathe has come to symbolize a series of ongoing catastrophes: medical, racial, and environmental. In this lecture, Jacob Edmond explores how poets—who have always paid attention to breath—might help us find the resources to address these crises and, in so doing, to reimagine literature and the world.

About Professor Edmond's research:
Jacob Edmond makes sense of our rapidly changing world by exploring literary and artistic responses to global shifts in media, culture, economics, and geopolitics. His first book, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press), explores how poets responded to the upheavals wrought by the end of the Cold War. His second book, Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (Columbia University Press), examines literary and artistic works that address the proliferating copies of online media and the replication enabled by globalisation. His new Marsden project draws on literary and artistic responses to the news media to ask why our instant access to news from around the world brings not global understanding but paralysing confusion. By closely engaging with texts in Chinese, Russian and English, all his work addresses the global trends and linguistic and cultural differences that shape our contemporary world.

This lecture will be followed with light refreshments, tea, coffee & juice.