Please join Evan MacCarthy (Music and Dance), Marjorie Rubright (English), and Steve Mentz (English) for a multimodal workshop on sonic and poetic icescapes of the Arctic. A part of The Great Melt: The Arctic Frontier of the Anthropocene, this workshop centers the role of the humanities in shaping Arctic imaginaries. Moving across sonic, linguistic, and poetic engagements, we will open onto conversations that delve into the blue humanities. 

The dialogue-centered workshop will feature guided listening of musical works by John Luther Adams, Tanya Tagaq, and Lei Liang, and an exploration of the place of language in imagining human relations with ice, together with a close reading of the Inupiat poet Joan Naviyuk Kane’s recent collection of lyrical poems Dark Traffic (2021). 

Invited guest, Professor Steve Mentz (St. John's University), early modern scholar and pioneer of the blue humanities, will show how we are moving “Toward a Poetics of Solid Water.” 

This event is presented in association with Elements, Renaissance of the Earth, & Anthropocene Lab