Birds of a Feather Symposium

There's a fun event going on next week at the Dudley Bailey Library in Andrews Hall at University of Nebraska-Lincoln! It's called: “BIRDS OF A FEATHER (or: A FOWL UNDERTAKING?)” It's basically a colloquium that's all about birds, place-based, and eco-critical exploration. (I once wrote a paper about birds in The Crane Wife by The Decemberists. I am all over this scholarly approach to birds thing.)

The symposium will take place at the Bailey Library, February 26, 2010, 2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Some speakers, (from the email they sent out):

Dr. Jeffrey Karnicky, Assistant Professor of English at Drake University and author of Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture, will present from his work-in-progress, “Scarlet Experiment: Human-Bird Interactions in America,” which makes a wide swath from Audubon, Thoreau, and Dickinson to Roger Tory Peterson and Ken Kaufmann. His talk explores the limits of a system of ethical thought that seeks to engage birds as cognitive beings.

Dr. Thomas Gannon, Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at UNL, will read from his recently published book, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature, in which he perceives a recent egalitarian, even familial, re-connection with other species that transcends the oh-so-human poetic projections of centuries, as evidenced in the work of recent Native American poets.

Andrea Comiskey Lawse, 3rd-year Ph.D. candidate in English at UNL, brings an interest in dietary theory and criticisms of taste to the table, exploring, for instance, whether the discourse of a Western “Culture of Taste” has helped establish an informal ornithological taxonomy of songbird versus fowl, of noble bird of prey versus despised carrion-eater.