Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Committee Director

Marc Ouellette

Committee Member

Rosaleen Keefe

Committee Member

Jane Alberdeston

Committee Member

Connie Ruzich

Abstract

There can be no question that war is shaped by and has shaped cultures, and yet as an object of study it is rarely looked at from a cultural studies perspective. It is the great epics of war that form the cornerstones of Western literary tradition. It is the impact of war that gave rise to fields like trauma and memory studies. It is the propaganda produced, the hijacking of cultural industries, that help perpetuate wars. The War Poetry Map Project and accompanying written dissertation seek to move beyond historical and political contexts and view war as a cultural object. One way of doing this is using cultural geography and geopoetics. Political geography is shaped by war, often without regard to cultural considerations and often through imperial or colonial means. By taking poetry of war and building an archive that is arranged geographically rather than by historical period or theme, new considerations come into play and cultural complications can be revealed. Using poetry as both a method and an object of study allows for an increased understanding of war and its consequences, both personal and cultural. Through considerations of cultural trauma, poetry can be used to supplement historical accounts of war and critically give voice to those most marginalized by war. There truly is a universality to suffering, yet without seeing it all in one place perhaps we are not, as a society or human race, ready/able to do anything about it. The War Poetry Map Project is an open-source digital humanities project that endeavors to address this by creating an interactive digital map of war poetry that is accessible to all and combines more than 650 poems together in a single digital platform. Through its transtemporal and transnational approach to poetry, it will be clear to users that the suffering of war from the past 125 years transcends borders, regions, cultures, and time. In doing so, the War Poetry Map Project presents the argument that because war is a human creation, it will take uniquely human creation and creativity to stop it.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

https://doi.org/10.25777/f3m0-qd34

ISBN

9798197809957

ORCID

0009-0004-1163-8904

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