The Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers who share an interest in the long and varied tradition named by “poetics” and in the particular structures of thought that poetry articulates across languages and over time. Our highly engaged membership includes students and faculty from across the language-focused humanities fields, as well as scholars working in ethnic, area, and performance studies. Cluster faculty and students work together to generate theoretically innovative accounts of the poetries of the near and distant past, as well as of marginalized communities in the U.S. and abroad.
Members of the Graduate Cluster in Poetry and Poetics are core participants in the multi-platform initiatives of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium (PPC), which is Northwestern’s central forum for the performance, discussion, and study of poetry and poetics. Students interested in pursuing a PhD in African-American Studies, Art History, Comparative Literary Studies, English, French and Italian, German Literature and Critical Thought, Music, Performance Studies, Philosophy, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Theatre and Drama are encouraged to find a second intellectual “home” in this interdisciplinary cluster.
For more information, visit our page at The Graduate School’s website.
Current Graduate Cluster Students
Toby Altman is a poet and PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern. His research links Renaissance and Avant-Garde poetry and poetics in order to examine the politics of form in a transhistorical, comparative context. He holds a BA in English from Swarthmore College.
Patrícia Anzini holds a BA and MA in Literary Studies partially from her hometown Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP (Brazil) and from the University of Winnipeg (Canada) where she wrote her thesis on Brazilian poets from the Marginal Poetry and a musical movement called Tropicalism. She is interested in representations of the modern and postmodern condition in Brazilian and American literature.
Jayme Collins is a PhD student in the English department at Northwestern. Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century Anglophone literature.
Maria Dikcis is a PhD student in the English department at Northwestern. Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century poetry, transnational literature, visual culture, and aesthetic theory.
Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a PhD student in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern. His research focuses on contemporary Black poetry collectives alongside questions of institution building, diaspora, and the relationship between artistic and political movements in the post-civil rights era. He received an MFA in poetry from NYU and a BA in Comparative Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
Todd Nordgren is a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern. His research interests include global modernisms, early 20th century avant-garde poetics, and queer theory. He holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Miranda Smith is a PhD student in the Religious Studies department at Northwestern. Her research interests include modern Tibetan literature, poetry and poetics, and autobiography studies. She holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a BA from Mount Holyoke College.