Catching up with our Faculty: Kamran Javadizadeh Edition

This past summer, many of our faculty traveled and gave talks all around the world. We’ll be featuring a few of them in the coming weeks—this time, we’ll be focusing on Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who traveled to the UK and spoke about poetry in Oxford and Cambridge.

Professor Javadizadeh was invited to give a lecture on June 5th at the American Literature Research Seminar in Oxford, and he presented on ‘The National Poetry Crisis.’ Dr. Javadizadeh drew from the conclusion to his forthcoming book for his talk, which centered on a poetry festival which had been organized at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1962, and which happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“After the first day of the conference,” explained Dr. Javadizadeh, “President Kennedy came on television and announced that there were these missiles in Cuba. The Poetry Festival was happening in the Library of Congress, which is right next to the capitol building itself.” The festival’s setting, and its status as “in some ways a kind of state-sponsored event,” led the participants to ask questions: “How does the kind of poetry that was being written in that era accommodate or take the measure of a kind of sudden existential public crisis that’s happening? Does poetry feel irrelevant in a moment like that, or does it feel newly relevant in surprising ways?”

Professor Javadizadeh went on to note that one of the poets who did not attend the conference was Sylvia Plath, who was living in England at the time, and was in the midst of “a great burst of creativity, where she’s writing one or two—sometimes three—amazing poems a day, and is leading into the last months of her life.” Dr. Javadizadeh then read one of Plath’s poems from this time, “Ariel,” as “a poem about the bomb, and about her own metabolizing of anxiety about apocalypse.”

Intriguingly, according to Dr. Javadizadeh, “While the poets at the festival find themselves feeling kind of inadequate to the moment, Plath actually is the one who is carrying the form.”

Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he enjoyed giving the lecture, and that it was “a great event—the room was full of graduate students, other faculty in English, and some interested members of the public.” Afterwards, there was time to help in a ‘viva,’ a dissertation defense for a doctoral student, and “to take in Oxford itself, to visit museums, to check out these pubs that have been there for eight hundred years or whatever.”

In addition, by coincidence, Dr. Javadizadeh was able to meet up with one of his own Villanova undergraduate students at Oxford, who happened to be there studying abroad. Maria Therese Barry, ’26, noted that “It was such a surreal experience to see Dr. Javadizadeh while I was abroad in Oxford! It felt like worlds colliding that two Villanovans could come across each other in a completely different part of the world. I remember him telling me at the Pre-Registration Reception in the fall of 2024 that he would be speaking there after I shared my news of going abroad, but actually going to the event and hearing him speak is something I will always remember. It was a wonderful opportunity to hear firsthand about his academic research in general, which was especially exciting for me since I usually am not able to hear about my professors' research during classtime.”

Following the Oxford visit, on the 11th of June, Dr. Javadizadeh participated in a one-day symposium, organized by the professors Jess Cotton and Christian Gelder at Cambridge, on “The Aesthetics of the Clinic.” As articulated in the symposium’s initial call for papers, “This one-day symposium draws together scholars working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics and mental health to prompt a discussion on the relationship between psychiatric institutions and the production of literature.” As Dr. Javadizadeh explained, “This was a series of talks, mostly about literary form and its relationship to psychoanalysis, (as well as) art and its relationship to psychotherapeutic practices more broadly speaking. Jess had heard that I was coming to Oxford, and she was wondering if I could give the keynote lecture to the symposium, so I was really thrilled to get to do that.”

Dr. Javadizadeh’s talk was about the poet Robert Lowell and his experience of psychiatric institutionalization, “and the way the language of psychiatry, as Lowell experienced it in the 1950s, came to inform his sense of what autobiographical poetry might look like. My argument,” explained Javadizadeh, “is that, in writing about his inner life, he’s doing so in ways that he’s absorbed rom, among other sources, a kind of psychiatric treatment that he received.”

Thanks to Dr. Javadizadeh for sharing his recollections of his trip, and we look forward to hearing from more of our faculty about their travels!

Photo courtesy of Maria Therese Barry '26