LENS event – Ecology, Memory, Poetry: Reading Paul Celan in the Anthropocene

The Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) and the Working Group in Memory Studies present: Ecology, Memory, Poetry: Reading Paul Celan in the Anthropocene

Paul Celan, one of the most important poets of post-World War II literature, is famous for his lyrical engagements with memory and the Holocaust. In recent years, he has also been read as a poet who addresses some of the most fundamental issues of environmental thought and writing in the Anthropocene: deep time, altered landscapes, new materialisms, posthumanisms, expressions of more-than-human loss, and poetry in its relation to geology. This roundtable brings together two experts on Celan and the environmental humanities – Jason Groves and Paweł Piszczatowski–with a poet and researcher, Rachel Kaufman, to explore Celan as an environmental poet.

A roundtable with:

Jason Groves (University of Washington)
Author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and Mineral Imaginary (2020)

Rachel Kaufman (UCLA)
Author of Many to Remember (2021)

Paweł Piszczatowski (University of Warsaw)
Author of Chthonic Shards: Paul Celan’s Poetics of Earth (2026)

Moderators: Ursula K. Heise and Michael Rothberg

Co-Sponsored by the Department of English