Programs and Centers

• Early Modern Studies
  
  
• Poetics at Buffalo
  The Poetics Program is a major source of interest and activity in the doctoral, masters, and undergraduate programs of the Department. The program was founded in 1991 by five literary artists-scholars in the Department, including Gray Chair Professor Charles Bernstein, Capen Chair Professor Robert Creeley, Professor Susan Howe, and McNulty Chair Professor Dennis Tedlock. The program also includes Adjunct Professors Loss Pequeño Glazier, Director of the Electronic Poetry Center, and Robert Bertholf, Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection. The Poetics Program has become a center for the study of poetry and poetics, with many national and international scholars and poets visiting for short-term and postdoctoral residencies. The program also sponsors a wide range of poetry-related magazines and presses, both print and electronic. The activities of the program are supplemented by UB's Special Collections library, which is second only to the Library of Congress in its holdings in contemporary poetry books and manuscripts (including the largest collection of James Joyce's manuscripts and papers in the United States).
  
  
• Comparative Literature
  
  
• Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture
  
  
• The Electronic Poetry Center
  Directed by adjunct faculty member Loss Pequeño Glazier, the Poetics Program's Electronic Poetry Center offers access to extensive primary and secondary resources for innovative digital and contemporary poetry and poetics. It supplements course curricula in the English Department and departments of literature and media study worldwide, used by ten million users in ninety countries each year. The EPC is sponsored by the Department of Media Study and the Department of English.
  
  
• Center for the Americas
  
  
• Film Studies

Department Activities, Lecture Series, Reading Groups

In keeping with the variety and flexibility of our programs, we host a wide range of lectures, performances, readings, conferences and films. Conference topics during the last several years have included: "Leading Ladies: Women and Power in Films from the Twenties and Thirties," "A-Dieu: Theology and Philosophy in Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas" (the Annual Colloquium in Critical Theory), "Particularism" (for the Program in Literature and Society), "Border/Disputes" (sponsored by English and Comparative Literature), "The Object in Psychoanalysis," "Impulses of the Perverse," "Antigone" (for the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Literature), "Between Democracy and the Enlightenment" and "The State of the University/the University and the State" (the Graduate Group in Marxist Studies) and commemorative conferences organized by the Poetics Program to honor Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Leslie Fiedler and Allen Ginsberg. National conferences organized by graduate students have included "The Body," "Dead Lines," and "What's Eating You: Literature and Consumption."

Under the auspices of Gray Chair Professor Charles Bernstein, we have continued a series of readings titled Wednesdays at 4 Plus: Readings, Lectures, and Seminars in Contemporary Poetry, which brought such poets as Lyn Hejinian, Ray A. Young Bear, Adrienne Rich, Bob Perelman , Harreyette Mullen, John Ashbery, Steve McCaffrey, Jackson Mac Low, and Joan Jonas and to our campus.

Other nationally known poets have been brought to the department by the Abbott Poetry Reading Fund, including Marilyn Hacker, Louise Gluck, David Antin, Michael Davidson, Thom Gunn and Charles Simic.

The Victor H. Johnson Lecture Series features members of the department discussing recent research--Susan Eilenberg, for example, on "Milton and Quantification of Excess," Joan Copjec on "Psychoanalysis and Race," Jill Robbins on "Levinas and Literature," Carol Jacobs on "Antigone and Ethics."

The after-hours Reading Groups in topics like "Feminist Theory," "Finnegan's Wake," "Composition Theory," "Melville," "Heidegger," or (most recently) "Identification" provide an environment outside the seminar structure in which texts and ideas can be examined according to whatever rules the participants themselves have established. No single approach or agenda dominates discussion. Our watchwords are openness, curiosity, and flexibility.