IDROLOGIE/HYDROLOGIES AT UCHICAGO
The Kim-Park Book History Colloquium is proud to present
Poetry After Barbarism
The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism
Jennifer Scappettone
Associate Professor of English
Wednesday, October 15th, 2025
3:30–5:00pm
Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center
Joseph Regenstein Library, 1100 E. 57th Street
Join Jennifer Scappetone to celebrate the launch of her new book, Poetry After Barbarism, and the modes of collectivity and language crossings fostered by immigrant and refugee artist’s books alongside material from the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center.
DESCRIPTION
Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel.
In this talk, Scappetone will present part of her chapter on the category-defying Italian poet, translator and visual artist Emilio Villa alongside a copy of his Le idrologie, or Hydrologies (1968), highlighting the material ways in which the expanded field of visuality in artist’s books enables crossings of languages previously fenced off from one another as national.
SPEAKER
Jennifer Scappettone is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014), a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association’s Book Prize, and of Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, 2025). Locomotrix, her critical edition of Amelia Rosselli’s selected poetry and prose published in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press, won the biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize for Poetry in Translation. She curates Pennsound | Italiana, devoted to avant-garde and otherwise eclipsed Italian poetics. Her own poetry crosses over into the realms of book and performative arts: her most recent collection, a visual-verbal “score” devoted to Fresh Kills Landfill and an eclipsed Superfund-listed dump across from her childhood home on Long Island, is The Republic of Exit 43, and its collages were recently featured in an exhibition at Kunstverein München. Scappettone is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate of Gender & Sexuality Studies and of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts + Humanities Lab. Check out her courses on Poetry Of & Off the Page, The Book as Poetic Form, and Sensing the Anthropocene, all of which encourage the production of zines and artist’s books by students.
This program is free and open to all. Space is limited. We hope you can join us. If you can, we ask that you please register.