----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi all,
I am so pleased to introduce our first week's guests, who are all
formative and inspiring scholars, artists, and educators, Susan
Vanderborg, Sean Pessin, Mike Widner, and Sunny Xiang. This first week,
"Teaching Radio Heart, and Other Cyborg Poetry," centers a discussion on
the pedagogical implications of cyborg poetry within a variety of
disciplines and approaches.
Susan, Sean, Mike, and Sunny all taught the poetry from the collection
in their respective classes, and have been personally inspiring to me in
many ways. I have placed their bios below, along with personal
introductions to our meetings, and collective interests.
+
I first met Sean when he was an editor at Les Figues Press, and I held
the Kathy Acker Fellowship in 2014. I remember the generative and fun
times tabling at, and organizing literary panels for the West Hollywood
Book Fair, and working together at the press with a focus on avant
poetry and writing. Sean taught Radio Heart in a queer literature
course, at the California State University Northridge, and he is also an
incredible writer of fairy tales.
Mike and I met as graduate students with the HASTAC Fellowship, when we
were invited to Duke University with other HASTAC scholars for a digital
pedagogy gathering many years ago. I remember meaningful conversations
with Mike, not only on digital pedagogy, but on our shared interests in
poetry as well, and grateful for a continuing conversation on poetics,
robots, and poetry writing since that time. Mike taught Radio Heart in a
code poetry class at Stanford University, and has wonderful machine
poems forthcoming in the Machine Dreams Zine.
Sunny and I also have been long time colleagues and friends beginning
from graduate school, due to our interests in Asian American literature.
While we were in different departments, we took seminars in the field of
Asian American and ethnic literature together, and lovely lunches and
times off of Bancroft. Sunny has always been an inspiring interlocutor,
and she taught poems from the collection in her Asian American
Literature class at Yale University.
I had the great pleasure to visit the University of South Carolina to
give a poetry reading, and a talk for MFA students earlier this Fall,
with a kind invitation from Susan Vanderborg, who is a formative scholar
on cyborg and experimental poetry. Susan's scholarship is greatly
inspiring to my writing on poetics, and I am humbled she is writing an
article on Radio Heart; or How Robots Fall Out of Love, and taught
poetry from the collection in her English class.
+
To begin the week's conversation, I wondered if we could possibly begin
by discussing the implications of teaching robot or cyborg poetics
within respective disciplinary classrooms? Im excited for this
conversation since you have all taught the collection and other cyborg
literature within different disciplines, with Mike teaching in code
poetry, Sunny in Asian American Literature, Sean in queer studies, and
Susan in English, and I wondered what similarities or differences there
were, in responses from students, or pedagogical framing or challenges
of teaching robot poetry within different courses? I would love to learn
more on your own current work, and other concerns and ideas on cyborg
poetics and pedagogy.
Many thanks again to Sunny, Susan, Mike, and Sean for your time,
generous teaching, and our conversations. We welcome others on the
listserve to join the conversation as well, and greatly look forward to
this week's dialogue.
best,
Margaret
----
"Week 1: Teaching Radio Heart, and Other Cyborg Poetry"
Sean Pessin
Sean Pessin (US) has lived in Los Angeles his whole life; he earned an
B.A.
and M.A. in English at CSU Northridge (where he teaches), and an M.F.A.
from Otis College of Art and Design. He is the founding editor of agape:
a journal of literary goodwill and editor-at-large for Magra Books. His
work has appeared in The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, Interfictions
Online, The New Short Fiction Series, and is always fabulous and strange
and queer.
Sunny Xiang
Sunny Xiang (US) is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale
University.
She received her PhD in English from the University of California,
Berkeley,
in 2014. Her work engages 20th-21st-century Asian Anglophone literature,
world literature, U.S. ethnic literature, postcolonial literature, human
rights discourse, and narrative
and novel studies.
Mike Widner
Michael Widner (US) is in the joint employee of the Division of
Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and the Stanford University
Libraries, where he works as an Academic Technology Specialist. He works
with faculty and their research assistants as consultant or collaborator
in DLCL-based digital humanities and instructional technology projects.
He also helps organize and present events for the Digital Humanities
Focal Group.
He received his Ph.D in English from the University of Texas at Austin
in 2014. His dissertation, titled "Genre Trouble: Embodied Cognition in
Fabliaux, Gawain, and Bury St Edmunds."He is also the project director
for Bibliopedia, an NEH-funded platform for gathering, displaying, and
discussing humanities scholarship that employs linked open data (among
many other technical features). His period specialization is in medieval
Britain and France with a focus on romance, fabliaux, and Latin
chronicles. He works in Middle English, Old French, Latin, Old English,
Python, Javascript, Perl (deprecated), PHP, a few other machine
languages, and on the command line.
Prior to entering graduate school, he worked for too many years as a
UNIX Systems Administrator at a local ISP that was eventually absorbed
by the corporation now known as AT&T. He can set up a LAMP stack in his
sleep. He's learning to ride a skateboard and can do a few tricks.
Susan Vanderborg
Susan Vanderborg (US) writes about contemporary experimental and
speculative poetry, artists’ books, and bio poetry, with articles on
texts by Fiona Templeton, Darren Wershler, Johanna Drucker, Rosmarie
Waldrop, Steve Tomasula, and Christian Bök. She teaches classes on
American cyborg literature, poetry collages, palimpsests, and book art
as an Associate Professor of English at the University of South
Carolina. She is currently working on an article on transformations of
the lyric in Radio Heart and other cyborg poems.
--
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
University of Oregon
On 2017-05-01 15:08, Renate Terese Ferro wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
It is with the greatest of pleasure that I introduce new media
artist/poet Margaret Rhee to the -empyre- listserv. Margaret has
agreed to shepherd the May discussion on empyre and I could not be
more excited. Her book, Radio Heart or How Robots Fall Out of Love
(Finishing Line Press, 2015)” caught my eye a few months ago when I
noticed my old friend and poet Cecil Giscombe’s blurb about Rhee’s
RADIO HEART. Previously, I knew of Margaret’s work both as a gifted
writer but also an artist engaged in the complications of technology,
race, gender and the body. I was thrilled when she agreed to be our
guest and to organize a group around her interests. This month our
discussion “Robot Poetics, Ephemera, and Other Concerns” will bring
together writers, artists, activists, technologist’s and more. I want
to thank Margaret for her creative, open, spirit and invite other
empyreans to join in. I hope you enjoy this month.
Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar engaged in the poetics
and technologies of difference. As a poet, she is the author of
chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) Radio Heart; or How Robots Fall
Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and the forthcoming
full-length collection, Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017). She
is the recipient of poetry fellowships from
the Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, Les Figues Press, Hedgebrook, and
Kundiman. Her academic writing has been published in Amerasia, Cinema
Journal, and GLQ, and she is completing her monograph How We Became
Human: Race, Robots and the Asian American Body. With Dr. Brittney
Cooper, she co-edited a special issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender,
Technology, and New Media on “Hacking the Black/White Binary.” As a
new media artist, her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected
to exhibit at the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3, and in
2014, she was awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Public Service for
her collaborative and social practice feminist HIV/AIDS digital
storytelling project in the San Francisco
Jail(www.ourstorysf.wordpress.com).
Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor in the Women’s and
Gender Studies department at the University of Oregon. In 2014, she
earned her Ph.D. in ethnic and new
media studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Renate
Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rfe...@cornell.edu
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
--
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
University of Oregon
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
