Franke Lectures in the Humanities

The Franke Lectures in the Humanities take place in conjunction with an upper-level seminar in the Humanities Program. The Franke Lectures take important conversations in the humanities beyond the classroom with a series of public lectures. Thanks to the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, the Franke Lectures in the Humanities bring distinguished scholars to Yale University, where they present vital work in the humanities to a wide and general audience.

The fall 2023 Franke Lectures in the Humanities follow the theme of the Yale College seminar “Imagining Global Lyric,” taught by Ayesha Ramachandran. This lecture series will approach lyric poetry in cross-cultural and transmedial ways, to consider lyric across languages, cultures, and media. Distinguished speakers: Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy (September 19), Marilyn Hacker (October 24), Robin Coste Lewis (November 1), and Linda Gregerson (December 5). All lectures will be at 4:30 in HQ 136; free and open to the public.

Fall 2023 Lectures

Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy
University of Chicago
Tuesday, September 19, 2023 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

“Our first language was English as a Second Language”: A Poetry Reading and Talk on Exophony

Literature has always been shaped by linguistic outsiders: Jack Kerouac mostly spoke French into his teens; Joseph Conrad enlarged the British novel in his third language, after Polish and French; the most widely read book in African literature, Chinua Achebe’s English-language masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, was written by a native Igbo speaker. “Exophonic” authors have been writing the story of world literature in acquired languages from the learned Chinese verse of Nara-period Japan to the London-born Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2018 Italian novel Dove mi trovo (translated into English as “Whereabouts”).

In this hybrid poetry reading and talk, Srikanth Reddy will read from his poetry and discuss exophony and the global lyric—with reference to the April 2022 special issue of Poetry magazine on “Exophony.”

Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian (UK), the New York Times, and Poetry; and he is currently the poetry editor of the Paris Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he edits the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.

Marilyn Hacker.jpg
Marilyn Hacker
City College of New York
Tuesday, October 24, 2023 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

The Subaltern Sonnet: A Canonical Form Centers Unauthorized Voices

In this lecture, Marilyn Hacker will speak about poets, mostly writing in America, that may be considered “marginalized”—racially, ethnically, by immigration status, by gender, by sexuality, by language of origin—and the sonnet in English.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently, Calligraphies (Norton, 2023), and translator of twenty-three books by French and Francophone poets, including Samira Negrouche, Claire Malroux and Hédi Kaddour, as well as an essay collection, Unauthorised Voices. She was editor of the Kenyon Review for five years, and on the editorial collective of the French journal Siècle 21 for eight. She lives, mostly, in Paris.

Robin Coste lewis Headshot (c) K. Miroire
Robin Coste Lewis
Wednesday, November 1, 2023 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history. From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center.

Robin Coste Lewis is the former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her service as Poet Laureate of Los Angeles focused on truth and reconciliation projects dealing with the city’s history. Her poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), was honored with the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, is a genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration to change the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure.

Lewis is a Cave Canem fellow, a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and a Ford Foundation Art of Change fellow. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. A finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Hurston/Wright Award, as well as the International War Poetry Prize, Lewis has published her work widely in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the New York Times, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Currently, she is a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Southern California and a 2019 Guggenheim fellow. Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.

Linda Gregerson, University of Michigan
Linda Gregerson
University of Michigan
Tuesday, December 5, 2023 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

Lyric Poetry in an Era of Social Division

Civil conversation—the thoughtful, exploratory engagement of heart and mind, collective attention to issues of collective urgency—has taken a terrible hit in recent years, in the United States and throughout the world. Put simply, we don’t seem to be very good at talking to one another anymore or at listening to those whose experience, hopes, and fears are different than our own. Where can we turn? Many, of all races and walks of life, have turned to lyric poetry, with a resultant burgeoning, in Anglophone poetry alone, of diverse voices, perspectives, and forms. Lyric poetry has long been identified as the genre of personal expression, and that is surely one of its strengths, but as poetry written to be read by others, it has always occupied a complicated terrain that is at once public and private. Its subjects are not always easily consoling, but its premise, the written-to-be-read part, is by nature a hopeful one.

Linda Gregerson is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently of Canopy (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022). She is also the author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic; Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry; and numerous essays on early modern English and contemporary American poetry. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Gregerson directs the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan, and London.