The Department of English is pleased to annouce the 2026 Duffy Lecturer is Jennifer Scappettone, poet, translator, and Professor of English at The University of Chicago.
Reception to follow.
About Jennifer Scappettone
Jennifer Scappettone’s work resides in zones of confluence and cross-contamination of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, on the page and off. Her research and teaching interests span the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on ecopoetics, environmental justice, and the environmental humanities; art and activism; radical documentary; comparative global modernism; the history of the avant-garde and of marginalized art collectives; the evolution of cities, geographies of modernity, and critical occupations of place and space; poetry and poetics; literatures of migration, travel, and displacement; barbarism, translingualism, and other futures of language in global contexts; translation; Italian culture and its echo in others; gender and sexuality studies; relations between literary and other arts, including visual poetry, book arts, new media, and performance studies; and art and architectural history, visual culture, and aesthetics. She also works in Creative Writing and Romance Languages and Literatures, and is a faculty affiliate of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She spearheaded, and currently advises, the Environmental Humanities + Arts Lab (The City and its Others).
About the Duffy Lecture Series
The Duffy Lecture Series, founded in 1993, honors the great teacher-scholar Joseph M. Duffy (1924-1988), who taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1954 to 1988. Past Duffy lecturers include Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Robert S. Levine, Virginia Jackson, and Tom McCarthy.