Annual Stephen Copley Lecture

'Border Trouble: Scottish Balladry, Mediality and World Literature'

About the speaker: Professor Maureen McLane, New York University

Maureen McLane is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (CUP, 2000, 2006). She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008).

Her research and teaching focus on British literature and culture, 1750-1830, and more broadly on the intersection of poetry, "literature," and modernity: special areas of interest include romanticism, modernism, balladry (British and American), mediality, 20th- and 21st-century poetries in English, the human sciences, historiography, and the case of Scotland.

A poet and critic, she is the author of Same Life: poems (FSG, 2008) and World Enough: poems (FSG, 2010), as well as My Poets—an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism. Her third book of poems, This Blue, is forthcoming from FSG in 2014.

A contributing editor at Boston Review, her articles on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality have appeared widely, in (e.g.) The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Review, The Washington Post, American Poet, and on the Poetry Foundation website. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle's Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing; she served on the Board of Directors of the NBCC, 2007-2010. Before coming to NYU, she taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project.

She thinks print is not dead, nor poetry, nor the human—though regarding what the latter two might be, she remains agnostic.