Thalia Field
Associate Professor of English:
Literary Arts Program
Phone: +1 401 863 9789
Thalia_Field@Brown.EDU
Thalia Field works in interdisciplinary arts extending experimental fiction and poetry to multi-media and experimental performance. She has particular interests in ecology and environmental poetics, Buddhist poetics and philosophy, as well as history of science and art.
Biography
Thalia Field has two books published with New Directions: POINT AND LINE (2000) and INCARNATE: STORY MATERIAL (2004) and a third forthcoming with ND in 2009, BIRD LOVERS, BACKYARD. Another book, ULULU (CLOWN SHRAPNEL) was published by Coffee House press in 2008, with film stills by Bill Morrison. Thalia's writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Chicago Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Theater, Central Park, Chain, and Conjunctions, where she served as editor and senior editor from 1995-1999. Performance works and plays include THE POMPEII EXHIBIT, composed by Toshiro Saruya, which was awarded an NEA commission grant in 1992, and HEY-STOP-THAT which was published in Theater magazine and produced at various US venues. Her current stage work is in collaboration with media artist and choreographer Jamie Jewett and includes SEVEN VEILS (Philadelphia and NY 2003) AFTER THE FALL (NY and Boston, 2004) and REST/LESS (NY, Boston, Providence 2005). Thalia serves on the editorial board of Chain, an interdisciplinary arts journal, and Play:A Journal of Plays. Before joining the faculty at Brown, Thalia taught at Bard College and at the Writing and Poetics program at Naropa University.
Interests
Point and Line (New Directions, 2000) is a collection of experimental prose, poetry, and drama, exploring the nature of language as it is used to identify characters and dramatic events. Combining a multitude of different "discourse fields" each piece creates a linguistic frame in which the impossibility and failure of "self" is dramatized. Pieces in the collection can be considered prose, poetry, lyric essay, or drama.
Incarnate: Story Material (New Directions, 2004) collects a series of poetic, dramatic, and lyric essay works, each formally distinct and concerned with the ways in which being embodied, framed, named, and attached to "biography" serves to trouble narratives and language. More formally amorphous than the first collection, this book moves freely between birth, death, cartography, and issues of survival which move far beyond the human in scale.
ULULU (Clown Shrapnel) is a full-length experimental novel, almost a "performance," which dramatizes the character "Lulu" -- from Wedekind's Erdgeist plays and Berg's opera -- to trace the history of the archetype as it winds through the cultural history of Europe in the nineteenth/early twentieth century. Focusing on the movement from commedia to clowning, the book also fragments biography and history into shards and shreds of a thousand-and-one lies and secret stories.
Forthcoming books include Experimental Animals (in progress), a book-length essay/poetic epic takes, as its starting point, the life and work of French physiologist Claude Bernard, his wife and children, and a handful of historical characters from 2nd Empire and 3eme Republic Paris. Combining historical and imaginative work, the book explores the origins of the "laboratory" and "experimental medicine" as they came to define science and fueled aesthetic thought in the modern period.
Awards
Joukowsky Assistant Professor, Brown University, 2004
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Opera Commission, 1993
Affiliations
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)
Teaching
My teaching focuses on interdisciplinary arts, the practice and study of art/artists who work/have worked outside the traditions of any one genre. My courses tend to focus on writing as a core practice, with exploration of text in sculptural, environmental, performance and multi-media directions. Other aspects of my teaching include collaborative and innovative classroom techniques, as well as an approach to writing which encourages personalized research into both familiar and unfamiliar areas. Specific artists I have an interest in teaching in extended seminars include John Cage, Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht. Also, I teach environmental and eco-poetics, as well as contemplative/awareness practice approaches to writing.
Funded Research
HERE Artist in Residency, HERE Center for the Arts, NYC (2004-5)$1200
Scholarly Technology Group grant, Brown University, 2004 $10,000
Boulder Arts Commission Grant, 2000 $500
NEA Opera Commission, 1993 $30,000