Maggie Evans, PhD candidate, Department of English, "Strategies of Silence in American Women’s Poetry."

Summary: "My work on silence in Niedecker’s poetry is part of a more wide-ranging project exploring how 20th-century American women use innovative forms to manage conflicting desires for speech and silence. I argue that women poets often seek both to extend and to limit language, and I investigate how their poetic experiments allow them simultaneously to achieve these contradictory goals. My hope is that the finished work will be useful to literary scholars studying the complexities of form in American women’s poetry. Further, I hope it will contribute to the growing conversation in women’s studies seeking critical methods responsive to the variability and complexity of women’s experiences and their ways of representing, or refusing to represent, those experiences."