Application required
In the Fall of 2017, a wide range of SAS students worked in tandem with design students at Mason Gross to create a multilingual political poetry exhibition for the new Rutgers Academic Building, to frame and accompany an international, interdisciplinary colloquium on the theme of poetry's relations to politics. The purpose of this exhibition was to gather and celebrate powerful political poems from all over the world so as to represent as many languages spoken at Rutgers as possible — both taught and heritage languages — and featuring all time periods, including Antiquity. Over 120 poster-poems were ultimately exhibited, each one chosen, researched, and prepared with a translation and brief for design ideas by the student-curators registered in an SAS Poetries-Politics Interdisciplinary course, as well as by other students, faculty, and alumni recruited throughout our university to join in the exhibition project.
The exhibition was spectacular and proved a powerful statement about what students can do when collaborating on an exciting interdisciplinary project. As a result, many within the Rutgers community — students, faculty, and administrators alike — called for efforts and offered resources to study, preserve, critically reframe and present the collection for future enjoyment and use. In this Poetries-Politics 2 course we will do exactly that: create an Exhibition Catalogue for the posters that will help viewers understand what our Poetries - Politics multilingual exhibition is about - a catalogue that will help future Rutgers students tap into this legacy of their own creation and also help spread the idea of our project to students in other Universities.
Student-curators in this SASHP Poetries - Politics II Interdisciplinary Honors seminar will study the Poetries - Politics poster collection and work together with faculty, designers, curators, and editors throughout Rutgers - New Brunswick community to create texts about the posters that will be featured in the Exhibition Catalog. As with the original group of Student-Curators who worked on preparing poems and translations for the posters, for the Exhibition Catalog we will need to recruit a select group of Honors Student-Curators with a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and expertise in languages from all over the world. We also are seeking a wide variety of perspectives and interests so students from all majors and disciplines are encouraged to apply.
About Professor Shaw
While the focus of my research has been modern poetry, particularly Mallarmé, most of my work explores poetry's relations with other genres (theater and various types of fictional and non-fictional prose) and with disparate art forms (music, dance, and the visual arts). I often work across centuries as well. Much of my teaching has revolved around the Zimmerli Art Museum's fin-de-siècle illustrated book and journal collection. I have also published poetry and a bilingual children's book. I am currently engaged in translating the works of contemporary French poet, Claude Mouchard.