Past event
Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse Reading and discussion with Prof. Anahid Nersessian (UCLA)
Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes has been called “a radical and unforgettable reading” of Keats's poetry, earning rave reviews in publications like the TLS, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe, which named it one of the Best Books of 2021. Nersessian collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. First published in February 2021 to coincide with the bicentenary of Keats's death, Keats's Odes is forthcoming in a new edition, out this fall from Verso Books.
Anahid Nersessian was born and raised in New York City. She attended Yale University as an undergraduate and got her Ph.D in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. After spending three years at Columbia University, she moved to Los Angeles, where she is a professor in the English Department at UCLA on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. She is the author of three books, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse (Chicago, 2021; Verso, 2022), The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago, 2020), and Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard, 2015), and has published widely in top scholarly journals as well as in The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, New Left Review, and n+1. She founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press.
To register for this event, please contact Dr Elodie Laügt (el40)