This past summer, many of our faculty traveled and gave talks all around the world. We’ll be featuring a few of them in the coming weeks—this time, we’ll be focusing on Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who traveled to the UK and spoke about poetry in Oxford and Cambridge.
Professor Javadizadeh was invited to give a lecture on June
5th at the American Literature Research Seminar in Oxford, and he
presented on ‘The National Poetry Crisis.’ Dr. Javadizadeh drew from the
conclusion to his forthcoming book for his talk, which centered on a poetry
festival which had been organized at the Library of Congress in the fall of
1962, and which happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“After the first day of the conference,” explained Dr.
Javadizadeh, “President Kennedy came on television and announced that there
were these missiles in Cuba. The Poetry Festival was happening in the Library
of Congress, which is right next to the capitol building itself.” The
festival’s setting, and its status as “in some ways a kind of state-sponsored
event,” led the participants to ask questions: “How does the kind of poetry
that was being written in that era accommodate or take the measure of a kind of
sudden existential public crisis that’s happening? Does poetry feel irrelevant
in a moment like that, or does it feel newly relevant in surprising ways?”
Professor Javadizadeh went on to note that one of the poets
who did not attend the conference was Sylvia Plath, who was living in England
at the time, and was in the midst of “a great burst of creativity, where she’s
writing one or two—sometimes three—amazing poems a day, and is leading into the
last months of her life.” Dr. Javadizadeh then read one of Plath’s poems from
this time, “Ariel,” as “a poem about the bomb, and about her own metabolizing
of anxiety about apocalypse.”
Intriguingly, according to Dr. Javadizadeh, “While the poets
at the festival find themselves feeling kind of inadequate to the moment, Plath
actually is the one who is carrying the form.”
Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he enjoyed giving the lecture,
and that it was “a great event—the room was full of graduate students, other
faculty in English, and some interested members of the public.” Afterwards,
there was time to help in a ‘viva,’ a dissertation defense for a doctoral
student, and “to take in Oxford itself, to visit museums, to check out these
pubs that have been there for eight hundred years or whatever.”
In addition, by coincidence, Dr. Javadizadeh was able to
meet up with one of his own Villanova students at Oxford, who happened to be
there studying abroad. Maria Therese Barry, ’26, noted that “It was such a
surreal experience to see Dr. Javadizadeh while I was abroad in Oxford! It felt
like worlds colliding that two Villanovans could come across each other in a
completely different part of the world. I remember him telling me at the
Pre-Registration Reception in the fall of 2024 that he would be speaking there
after I shared my news of going abroad, but actually going to the event and
hearing him speak is something I will always remember. It was a wonderful
opportunity to hear firsthand about his academic research in general, which was
especially exciting for me since I usually am not able to hear about my
professors' research during classtime.”
Following the Oxford visit, on the 11th of June, Dr.
Javadizadeh participated in a one-day symposium, organized by the professors
Jess Cotton and Christian Gelder at Cambridge, on “The Aesthetics of the
Clinic.” As articulated in the symposium’s initial call for papers, “This one-day
symposium draws together scholars working at the intersection of literature,
aesthetics and mental health to prompt a discussion on the relationship between
psychiatric institutions and the production of literature.” As Dr. Javadizadeh
explained, “This was a series of talks, mostly about literary form and its
relationship to psychoanalysis, (as well as) art and its relationship to
psychotherapeutic practices more broadly speaking. Jess had heard that I was
coming to Oxford, and she was wondering if I could give the keynote lecture to
the symposium, so I was really thrilled to get to do that.”
Dr. Javadizadeh’s talk was about the poet Robert Lowell and
his experience of psychiatric institutionalization, “and the way the language
of psychiatry, as Lowell experienced it in the 1950s, came to inform his sense
of what autobiographical poetry might look like. My argument,” explained
Javadizadeh, “is that, in writing about his inner life, he’s doing so in ways
that he’s absorbed rom, among other sources, a kind of psychiatric treatment
that he received.”
Thanks to Dr. Javadizadeh for sharing his recollections of
his trip, and we look forward to hearing from more of our faculty about their
travels!
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| Photo courtesy of Maria Therese Barry '26 |
