Public reading Network for Environmental Humanities: Jennifer Scappettone and Ifor Duncan

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts and is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago.

She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (surrounding post-911 US, published by Litmus in 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (a tale of two landfills, one notorious and one unknown but ultratoxic, published by Atelos in 2016). 

Scappettone has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the Janiculum Hill to Michigan’s Quincy Copper Mine, and her verse has been installed at venues ranging from the Maison des Cultures in Brussels to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York. 

Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018), and editor of Belladonna Elders Series: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna, 2009). She is also the translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, which won the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi award for poetry in translation. 

Her current project devoted to the ‘copper lyre’ subtending modern contemporary communications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature. Following a term as Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel, she is currently curating a series of ‘floating workshops’ devoted to the geopoetics of urban rivers.

Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist and interdisciplinary researcher. He is Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC project EcoViolence at Utrecht University.

Duncan’s research focuses on political violence against communities in the contexts of degrading watery spaces, processes, and materialities. These include river borders, mega-dam projects and rivers as dynamic archives of genocide. He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, and a fieldwork practice that involves submerged audio-visual methods. 

Duncan has a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London (2014-2019) where he was also lecturer (2022-2024). He was postdoctoral fellow at the New Institute Centre for the Environmental Humanities (NICHE), Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice (2020-22), and has taught in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.