Ada Smailbegovic
· Assistant Professor of EnglishBrown University · Literary Arts
Active 2009–2023
About
Ada Smailbegovic is an Associate Professor of English whose research explores the intersections between poetry and the history of science, environmental literature, feminist and queer theories of materiality, critical refugee epistemologies, animal studies, and affect theory. Her work particularly focuses on how practices of observation, experimentation, and description influence forms of attention in relation to the material world within the natural sciences and poetics. She has authored the book 'Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds' (Columbia UP, 2021), which discusses poetry, science, and minute processes of change that structure material worlds, and a poetry collection titled 'The Cloud Notebook' (Litmus Press, 2023). Her book received an honorable mention for the Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association. Currently, she is engaged in two theoretical projects addressing ecological scales of time, titled 'Snail Cinema' and 'The Blue of the Plums is the Memory of the Sea: Ecological Scales of Displacement,' as well as working on a collection of poetry about memory and ephemeral refugee experiences called 'Foxglove'.
Research signals
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Research topics
- Psychology
- Geography
- Oceanography
- Fishery
- Ecology
- Paleontology
- Medicine
- Geology
- Biology
Selected publications
At the Edges of Unmeeting: Geometries of Sea and Land in Marianne Moore’s Seascapes
Comparative Literature · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Geology
- Geography
- Oceanography
Abstract This article theorizes the edge between the land and the sea in Marianne Moore’s poetry and in Jeff Wall’s photograph “The Flooded Grave.” For these artists, the edge is constituted as an array of fluctuating temporal rhythms created by living organisms and dynamic abiotic elements, such as changing tides and the rocky or sandy substrates that make up the geological formation of the coastline. The edge appears in a number of Moore’s poems, including “The Fish,” which depicts the intertidal zone populated by injured “crow-blue mussel-shells,” “ink- / bespattered jelly fish,” and sea-stars, which resemble “pink / rice-grains.” Wall’s photograph, in turn, portrays a transposition between an aquatic and a terrestrial environment by placing an intertidal pool filled with star fish and sea anemones into the rectangular space of a grave. This article reads such moments as experiments in the textured edges of displacement. In these instances of intertidal encounter, organisms find themselves in unlikely configurations of space and time as a consequence of geophysical and ecological redistributions associated with effects of climate change.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Medicine
Routledge eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Psychology
Recent attempts to engage and develop modes of ethological practice that avoid deterministic and mechanistic accounts of animal action have often relied on affect as a way of articulating how animal bodies affect and are in turn affected by the animate and inanimate bodies around them. In this context affect has often functioned as an instigating site of change that opens up the experience of a particular animal to new possibilities for action and relation. This paper seeks to bring the significant role that affect has played in opening up new directions in ethological theory and practice in contact with a discussion of two currents in affect theory – one shaped by the genealogy of philosophical thought that stretches from Spinoza, through Gilles Deleuze, to contemporary thinkers such as Brian Massumi, and the other emerging from the reception of the American psychologist and cybernetics thinker Silvan Tomkins, in the context of queer theory, through the work of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank. The locus of intersection for these different modes of theoretical practice is the site-specific case study of monk parakeets (Myopsitta mona-chus) who have drawn on and incorporated the ornamental elaborations of human architecture into their own complex architectural nest constructions at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.
Awards & honors
- Honorable Mention for the Matei Calinescu Prize from the Mod…
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