Kempf Lecture Series: World Wide Webs in Japanese, Ainu, and Japanese Sign Language Poetry

Event time: 
Thursday, November 7, 2024 - 4:00pm
Location: 
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), Room 107 See map
320 York Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 
Andrew Campana
Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies 

Cornell University


Over the last several decades, poets in Japan have been grappling with the possibilities and limitations of the internet and of digital media more broadly. This talk will look at three poetic communities—Deaf poets using Japanese Sign Language, users of early Japanese poetry platforms online, and Indigenous Ainu poets—and explore not just the impact of digital technologies on the composition and circulation of poetry, but how poets used their work as alternative ways of thinking about digitality and communication at crucial moments of media transition

Andrew Campana is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Media in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. His monograph, Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media, is forthcoming from University of California Press in December 2024. He is currently working on a second book project about digital poetics, video games, and disability arts.