58. What Does Anthropology Sound Like: Poetry

Iran has dominated the US news cycle throughout 2026 so far. The U.S. and Israeli war of aggression in Iran just passed its 100th day, having come on the heels of the Islamic Republic regime’s brutal repression of protests around the country in January. Among other things, these ...  Show more

This is the first of a three-part miniseries covering the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. The conference presentations we’ll share with you today revolve around the stories people tell themselves about themselves; the ways people co ...  Show more

Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmil ...  Show more

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a collection of poems. Jade Cuttle looks at the way her poems were described and asks what do we categorise as nature writing? Her essay considers the idea of "coining" and the work of a new generation of poet ...  Show more

Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempl ...  Show more

Dr Mark Rawlinson explores the relationship between War and War Poetry using Owen's famous 'Preface' as the starting point. Dr Mark Rawlinson is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Leicester, working on nineteenth- and twentieth century literature, especially narr ...  Show more