Check Out Our Events!

Fall 2024:

We have a packed calendar this semester, but I want to highlight three events in particular, all celebrating important, recently-published books by our faculty. 

Elyse Graham, Professor 

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II (HarperCollins) 

October 30, 2024 | 5:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts. 

In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war. Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world. 

“An engaging study of wartime American intelligence. . . . Graham makes a good case for studying the humanities as both an instrument of learning and a weapon of war. Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.” — Kirkus Reviews

Simone Brioni, Professor 

Crazy Fish Sing (Yogurt Editions)

November 7, 2024 | 5:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the participation of contributor Loredana Polezzi, D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, Department of Languages and Cultures, and editorial assistant Peter Bruno, doctoral candidate, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.” — Kirkus Reviews 

“Entertainingly conveyed, with great respect and deep appreciation for their ingenuity and drive, Graham’s history is a powerful symphony for these unsung heroes whose professional skills and personal courage brought down the Nazi state. The modern intelligence community owes its existence to their rigor and resourcefulness. 

Readers fascinated by espionage will be eager to checkout Graham’s fresh telling of the surprising story of the OSS.” — Booklist (starred review) 

“Book and Dagger brings to light a spellbinding, untold aspect of World War II history...Graham takes readers all over the world to show that as the Nazis burned books, book lovers were defending the freedom of ideas, with relish.” — BookPage, 14 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 

 

 Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Distinguished Professor

Silver (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

November 14, 2024 | 5:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.

“To meet an increasingly isolating and terrifying era, Phillips retrenches in poetry, which, he claims, can be found everywhere. “The imagination hides in plain sight.” Poetry stands by us, ready, Phillips seems to say, to console us with the truth, whether or not we want to hear it.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“A collection to ponder in wonder.” —Michael Ruzicka, Booklist

“Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is ‘a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges’ . . . Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering.” —Publishers Weekly

“Phillips refines and reworks his own poetics against the backdrop of tradition. . . This tension between what “has never been done before” and the knowledge that “every poem has already been written” is central to Phillips; tradition is what he coaxes music from. He uses echo, reprisal, repetition and recurrence as strategies for invention.” —Lorna Knowles Blake, The Hudson Review

This beautiful, slender collection—small and weighted like a coin—is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. “Not the meaning,” Phillips writes, “but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life” powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips’s guiding principle—“part physics, part faith, part void”—that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.