The Beinecke Library is pleased to welcome visiting fellow Kimberly Lamm for the month March.

Edith and Richard French Fellow
Kimberly Lamm
Duke University

A Sense of Arrangement: Feminist Aesthetics in Contemporary Poetry

Kimberly Lamm is currently assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University.  Her research fields include contemporary feminist art, contemporary poetry, feminist theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century US Literature. She has published on a wide range of topics, from African-American visual culture to the novels of Henry James, from American poetry’s relationship to Deleuzean thought to literary depictions of fashion.  At the Beinecke Library she will be conducting research for her manuscript The Sense of an Arrangement: Feminist Aesthetics in Contemporary Poetry, which represents her long-standing research on the relations between contemporary poetry and feminist thought. The book analyzes the work of five poets who have contributed substantially to the field of contemporary poetry and women’s place within it: Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Claudia Rankine.  A Sense of Arrangement traces how these poets’ engagement with the excesses of vision and sound aligns with current feminist scholarship on sound, affect, and sensation.  Professor Lamm is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, has published art criticism in The Brooklyn Rail, curated exhibitions of contemporary art (most notably, Imaginary Arsenals for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and written catalog essays for a number of contemporary artists.