Inaugural Max Nänny Lecture
Dr. Catherine Gander, Maynooth University
2023 Max Nänny Prize Winner
Date: March 28 2025
Time: 14-16:00 (CET) *Note, this is Amsterdam time!
Location: University of Amsterdam, Oudemanhuispoort Room C2.17
Zoom: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/89880783769
We are delighted to announce the Max Nänny Lecture which aims to celebrate the prize, its recipients, and current research in word-image studies. This year, the lecture also anticipates the 2026 International IAWIS conference in Amsterdam, "Word, Image and Social Dynamics."
The inaugural lecture will be given by Dr. Catherine Gander from Maynooth University. Join us in Amsterdam or on Zoom for "Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics".
Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics
This lecture offers some thoughts from a current research project of the same name. Thinking about the turn in documentary poetry toward formal and medial hybridity on and beyond the page, I take as my starting point Muriel Rukeyser’s lifelong advocacy of the aesthetic and political potentiality of contact between models of knowledge and creativity, encapsulated in her repeated dictum that “poetry can extend the document”.
I consider contemporary poetry that works in a documentary vein to materialise (and dematerialise) language in various ways, often via visual, installation, and conceptual art. I'd like to think about how practitioners of transmedial poetics – Layli Long Soldier, Cecilia Vicuńa, Bhanu Kapil, and Claudia Rankine among them – adapt docpo techniques (e.g. parataxis, quotation, collage, found material, etc.), and adhere to its ideological investment in social justice in order to open new, shared, embodied spaces between verbal and visual textualities.
It is no coincidence that the majority of these poetic experiments at the intersections of word and image are by BIPOC or BAME poets, and by female and non-binary poets in particular. So the lecture will explore how the transgressive, transformative, and resistive capacities of transmedial poetics create new ways to respond to social realities and injustices that include racism, femicide, displacement, migration, exile, and extractive, settler colonialism.
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/catherine-gander