After fruitful pilots in Los Angeles, San Francisco (2023), and Palma de Mallorca (2024), our two-poet performance I Can Speak will now be presented at three symposiums in Leuven, Göttingen, and Montreal. Grateful to the organisers for selecting it for these international stages.
1.Interdisciplinary Symposium: Polyphony and Silence
15 May 2025 | STUK, Leuven, Belgium
Polyphony and silence are vital to understanding voice and representation, particularly in resisting dominant political and cultural forces. While polyphony unites multiple voices in diversity, silence functions as both omission and resistance, creating space for listening. These concepts confront nationalist and colonial narratives, particularly in migration and marginalisation.
From the enforced ‘culture of silence’ under dictatorship to the quietude of a village above a lake, both can serve as profound spaces for meaning-making and self-expression, as seen in our I Can Speak performance. This symposium explores how polyphony and silence intersect across literature, art, and activism to contest power structures.
Part of the ERC Starting Grant project COLLAB, which examines collaborative literary practices in migration and displacement. (https://collab-lit.com/about/)
2. Symposium: Contemporary Poetics, Communities, and Publics
May 16–17, 2025 | Organized by the EAAS Poetry Network | University of Göttingen, Germany
The symposium explores poetry’s presence in public spaces and its role shaped by poets, publishers, and readers.
Founded in 1954, the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) (https://eaas.eu/) aims to promote research on American culture and society and encourage cooperation among European scholars from various disciplines.
The Poetry Network of EAAS (https://eaas.eu/networks/) connects academics and practitioners to enhance the understanding of poetry’s role in culture, society, politics, and aesthetics.
3.Fifth Biennial Conference: New Lights on the Poem – Looking Back, Looking Forward
June 3–5, 2025 |Organized by The International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL) | Université du Québec à Montréal
Marking INSL’s tenth anniversary, this conference fosters international dialogue on lyric poetry theory. INSL (lyricology.org) is a nonprofit dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of poetry across languages, forms, and media. The event will explore how poems challenge our understanding of time, language, and meaning while engaging with history and the present. It also seeks to expand lyric theory beyond traditional models and examine its impact on teaching and sharing poetry.
