Professor Marianne Boruch
Fulbright Scotland Visiting Professor
Marianne Boruch is a Professor of English at Purdue University. She is at work completing her 8th collection of poems - Cadaver, Speak - and will be researching and writing an essay on the idea of poetry and diagnosis, a process at times notoriously not logical, based on startling leaps and metaphorical shifts. The essay will most particularly concern the lives and work of Conan Doyle and John Keats, both trained as physicians.
This current fascination with poetry and the body - and by extension, the reach into medicine and visual art - was seeded by an earlier in-house faculty fellowship during which she observed and participated in the Gross Human Anatomy lab at the Indiana University Medical School and in a Life Drawing Class, both on the Purdue University campus where she teaches. The proximity of Surgeons' Hall - one of the oldest, most revered surgical museums in the world - and the first class medical school at Edinburgh will aid and abet research for the final stages of the poems, and certainly set the groundwork for the essay. In addition, she will be teaching a poetry workshop in the Department of English Literature.
On 21 March, with the help of several volunteer readers from among the current medical and poetry students at Edinburgh, Marianne will present a completed portion of the book - 32 poems spoken by one of the cadavers she and the IU/Purdue students dissected, a woman who was 100 years old when she died. This will be a public, more theatrical component to her six months at the Institute.
Read by the author with students from Medicine and from English Literature at the University of Edinburgh
Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre
University of Edinburgh Old Medical School,
Teviot Place - Door 3, first floor
Wednesday, 21 March, 5.30 p.m. free to all – everyone welcome
Contact Details:
Email: Marianne Boruch
Tel: 0131 650 4397
Address:
Room 12
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The University of Edinburgh
Hope Park Square
Edinburgh EH8 9NW