Monday, December 21, 2020

Updated "Who Am I?" bio on me as an academic

Jennifer K Dick is an author, translator, teacher and poetry event organizer. Director of the English Department (from Jan 2021), CA member (2020-24), and Maître de Conférences (since 2010) at the Université de Haute Alsace, she teaches American Literature, Creative Writing and Civilization and is a member of the ILLE research lab.

Jennifer K Dick’s academic research explores the overlapping fields of poetry and visual poetics. She is fascinated by the liminal spaces between language use in the visual arts and typography and imported visual work implanted on the page in contemporary American and European Literature (as seen, for example, in the work of Susan Howe, Anne-Marie Albaich, Jacques Sivan or even Anne Carson). This focus on visuality has also lead to recent research on multilingualism as visual and textual space in the identity poetics of American authors, as seen in work by Craig Santos Perez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim and others. Publications on these topics have appeared in La poésie motléculaire de Jacques Sivan (presses du reel, 2017), American Multiculturalism in Context (Cambridge, 2017), Point, Dot, Period…The Dynamics of Punctuation in Text and Image (Cambridge, 2016), Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (University of Michigan Press,2015), Trans (university of Paris III), Poétiques scientifiques dans les revues européennes de la modernité (1900-1940) (Classiques Garnier, 2013) and in the volume L’Ecriture Emprisonnée (Harmattan, 2007). A forthcoming article from the Nov 2019 talk at the Université de Lyon II conference "Le Depaysment" on Craig Santos Perez is under peer review. Her talk at "La poésie hors du livre" conference (Paris, October 2013) extended her focus out of the book space as she examined billboard and wall publications of poetry.

On the road to this focus of research, Jennifer completed her DEA with Director Stéphane Michaud then her PhD with Director Jean Bessière at the Université de Paris III—la Sorbonne Nouvelle, France, in Comparative Literature (Littérature générale et comparée). Her DEA focused on the visual use of the page in Maurice Roche, Lisa Jarnot, Susan Howe and Claude Royet-Journaud’s works. Her doctorate focused on post-Mallarmean and Appolinairean influences on contemporary authors Myung Mi Kim, Anne-Marie Albiach and Susan Howe.

She also co-organized three conferences on Poetry in Expanded Translation in the UK and France alongside Zoe Skoulding and Jeff Hilson (Jan 2017-2019), and conceived of and co-organized the international conference Lex-ICON : treating text as image and image as text in June 2012 (http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/). Other conferences she co-organized include Station to Station with Didier Girard and Frédérique Tudoire-Surlapierre to honor the train industry and new Paris-Dijon-Mulhouse TGV line, and a conference on translation in the social sciences at EHESS with Stephanie Schwerter.

Other research interests of Jennifer K Dick's include the varied practices of postmodern poetic autobiographies (primarily those using visual and collage techniques in conjunction with more standard written forms of poetry) and cyborg poetry and poetics (Bhanu Kapil, Jacques Sivan). The interest in autobiography and reality vs fiction stems as much from her own creative as from her critical work. A first talk on this topic was presented at the 2013 SAES conference in Dijon, France ("Self-Naming in Postmodern Poetic Autobiography") though the roots of this work can be seen in her explorations of Susan Howe's writing (see her publication "Invisible Collisions: Considering Susan Howe’s Reform of the Poetic, Critical and Autobiographical Essay," online on Seventeen Seconds: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Ottawa, Canada, issue 7, June 2013, pp 7-24).

Tangential to her literary study, has been her interest in translation practice and theory. She has participated in conferences on alternative forms of translation and on self-translation (invited conference with Cole Swensen for the Nanterre University’s translation research lab). Jennifer also co-edited with Stephanie Schwerter 2 books on translation in the social sciences: Transmissibility and Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities (Ibidem Verlag, Stuttgart, 2012) and Traduire, transmettre ou trahir: Réflexions sur la traduction en sciences humaines (éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris, 2013).

Outside the sphere of strictly academic work, Jennifer K Dick co-organizes the bilingual monthly reading series Ivy Writers Paris (founded 15 years ago) and, since 2010, the residencies Ecrire l'Art with the Directrice of La Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d'Art Contemporain. Their book assembling 10 years of texts from this project, accompanied by their avant-propos, was published in Sept 2019: Ecrire l'art: DOSSIER DES OUVRAGES EXECUTES (Kunsthalle éditions, available through les presses du réel, France).

Jennifer is also a published author of poetry and prose (most recently Lilith: A Novel in Fragments, Corrupt Books, 2019, and forthcoming That Which I Touch Has No Name, Eyewear, London, 2021), and a translator of French artist’s statements and writing by poets or on visual artists--including Vannina Maestri  (forthcoming 2021), Véronique Arnaud (gallery catalogues, 2018), Jean-Michel Espitallier (in READ, 2019), Yves Peyré’s writing in the volume on Takesada Matsutani (Centre Pompiou/Hauser & Wirth, 2019), poems by Michaël Batalla (for book Concrete  LTD, 2014, and in PLU n°3 2015) and poems by Jérôme Mauche, among others.

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