Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture: Writing Environmental Humanities: Bhanu Kapil
Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture: Writing Environmental Humanities: Bhanu Kapil
An event in the Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture Series.
Join us as Bhanu Kapil gives talk titled "Writing the Archive: Notes on Impasse.
Bhanu Kapil, FRSL is a poet and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. She was previously an artist by-fellow of Churchill College, and a Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow in the Faculty of English (2019-2020). In 2020, Kapil retired from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, after twenty years. As a professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she taught seminars and workshops on narrative and architecture, performance art, and poetics.
Kapil is the author of seven full-length books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016), and How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). How To Wash A Heart was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice. Two new, non-identical editions of Incubation were published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA) in 2023. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance, was published by the 87 Press in October 2025 (and forthcoming in the U.S.) This collection is co-authored with Blue Pieta, a multi-disciplinary artist, dramaturg and dancer.
Kapil's installations include a poetry sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), a commission for The Weight of Words exhibition (2023), and Formidable Sparkles at The Printed Room, SALTS, Basel (2018). Kapil has developed performances for the ICA, Serpentine Galleries, Soho Poly Theater, Horse Hospital and The Place in London, most recently in collaboration with dramaturg/performer Blue Pieta. Catalogue contributions include poems to accompany exhibitions by Shahzia Sikander (Cincinnati Art Museum) and Bharti Kher (Arnolfini, Bristol, and Tate Modern, St.Ives). Other art writing contributions include poems written for The Animal Within (Mumok, Vienna), a poetic essay and film to accompany a retrospective of the work of Beverley Buchanan (Art Academy of Copenhagen) and a performance/poem to accompany a recent exhibition at Murray Edwards College, The Goddess, the Deity and the Cyborg. With Blue Pieta, Kapil has also written a performance score for The Glass Mosque, a collection in conversation with the work of Shahzia Sikander, forthcoming from Minerva Projects in New York. A work of speculative fiction, Pinky Agarwalia: The Biography of a Child Saint in Ten Parts, was published in 2020 by Ignota Books, as the preface of Unknown Language by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey. A science-fiction story appears in The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Sarah Shin and So Mayer (Silver Press).
Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University, a Fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature and the 16th International Poetry and People Prize (China). Two conferences on her work took place in 2024 and 2025, in France: at the Poets and Critics Symposium in Paris, and in Mulhouse (Université de Haute-Alsace.) Her current practice is grounded in performance and collaboration. In 2024 and 2025, Bhanu was also part of The Dark Reading Group convened by Katrina Palmer, artist-in-residence at The National Gallery. A public event took place in darkness at The National Gallery. In 2026, she is writing a Novel on Yellow Paper in the Archives Center at Churchill College, the national and commonwealth memorial to Winston Churchill, in proximity to the archive of Enoch Powell, a British politician who, in 1968, called for the repatriation of the Commonwealth-descended population in the UK, and their own British-born descendants. This is a novel that will never be published. By arrangement, this hand-written book will remain in the Archive, to be encountered by researchers in a future time.
An event in the Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture Series.
Join us as Bhanu Kapil gives talk titled "Writing the Archive: Notes on Impasse.
Bhanu Kapil, FRSL is a poet and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. She was previously an artist by-fellow of Churchill College, and a Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow in the Faculty of English (2019-2020). In 2020, Kapil retired from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, after twenty years. As a professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she taught seminars and workshops on narrative and architecture, performance art, and poetics.
Kapil is the author of seven full-length books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016), and How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). How To Wash A Heart was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice. Two new, non-identical editions of Incubation were published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA) in 2023. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance, was published by the 87 Press in October 2025 (and forthcoming in the U.S.) This collection is co-authored with Blue Pieta, a multi-disciplinary artist, dramaturg and dancer.
Kapil's installations include a poetry sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), a commission for The Weight of Words exhibition (2023), and Formidable Sparkles at The Printed Room, SALTS, Basel (2018). Kapil has developed performances for the ICA, Serpentine Galleries, Soho Poly Theater, Horse Hospital and The Place in London, most recently in collaboration with dramaturg/performer Blue Pieta. Catalogue contributions include poems to accompany exhibitions by Shahzia Sikander (Cincinnati Art Museum) and Bharti Kher (Arnolfini, Bristol, and Tate Modern, St.Ives). Other art writing contributions include poems written for The Animal Within (Mumok, Vienna), a poetic essay and film to accompany a retrospective of the work of Beverley Buchanan (Art Academy of Copenhagen) and a performance/poem to accompany a recent exhibition at Murray Edwards College, The Goddess, the Deity and the Cyborg. With Blue Pieta, Kapil has also written a performance score for The Glass Mosque, a collection in conversation with the work of Shahzia Sikander, forthcoming from Minerva Projects in New York. A work of speculative fiction, Pinky Agarwalia: The Biography of a Child Saint in Ten Parts, was published in 2020 by Ignota Books, as the preface of Unknown Language by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey. A science-fiction story appears in The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Sarah Shin and So Mayer (Silver Press).
Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University, a Fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature and the 16th International Poetry and People Prize (China). Two conferences on her work took place in 2024 and 2025, in France: at the Poets and Critics Symposium in Paris, and in Mulhouse (Université de Haute-Alsace.) Her current practice is grounded in performance and collaboration. In 2024 and 2025, Bhanu was also part of The Dark Reading Group convened by Katrina Palmer, artist-in-residence at The National Gallery. A public event took place in darkness at The National Gallery. In 2026, she is writing a Novel on Yellow Paper in the Archives Center at Churchill College, the national and commonwealth memorial to Winston Churchill, in proximity to the archive of Enoch Powell, a British politician who, in 1968, called for the repatriation of the Commonwealth-descended population in the UK, and their own British-born descendants. This is a novel that will never be published. By arrangement, this hand-written book will remain in the Archive, to be encountered by researchers in a future time.
Tawes Hall false