Max Karpinski
Max Karpinski joined the Department of Humanities in Fall 2023 as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow. He completed his PhD in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto Mississauga. He recently guest edited two special issues of Canadian Literature on the topic of “Poetics and Extraction,” and other recent research can be found in Canada and Beyond, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and SCL: Studies in Canadian Literature.
At York, Max is beginning a new project tentatively titled Siting Ecopoetics. The project tracks the shift in the last two decades towards an intensified entanglement between experimental ecopoetics and forms of climate activism. Organized around three particular times and “sites”—the west coast in the 1970s, the Ontario/New York border at the turn of the millennium, and anti-pipeline mobilizations across Turtle Island in the last decade-plus—Siting Ecopoetics traces the cross-border pollinations of American and Canadian poetry not only to demonstrate how these exchanges have contributed to the flourishing of an experimental environmental poetry in these respective countries, but also to make an argument about the impossibility of siloing ecopoetics and environmental theory within national literatures and boundaries.