Last Friday, Milligan’s honors program hosted a professor from Appalachian State University who spoke on how literature and science, specifically sciences like biology and ecology, could benefit from each other.

Dr. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is an English professor of feminist, cultural and ecocritical theory; Irish literature and culture; and poetry and poetics. In her lecture titled “Can poetry save the earth: gender, class and ecology in contemporary Irish poetry,” she connected poems from poets like W.B. Yeats and Paula Meehan to scientific ideas about sustaining the earth.

Kirkpatrick made the point that poetry can help make a statement and connects the reader in a way that simply stating data could not.

Dr. Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s photo from Appalachian State University.

“Data is compelling but it doesn’t move people,” Kirkpatrick said.

To explore the ideas that connect science to poetry, Kirkpatrick used the poem “Solace of Artemis,” which is about polar bears and how the area in which they live is slowly melting away.

Dr. Michael Blouin, Milligan’s assistant professor of humanities and English, asked about the value of scientists engaging with poetry.

“We tend to be so siloed off into our own disciplines that we don’t know what’s going on in others,” Kirkpatrick said. “But collaborations are good.”

Throughout the lecture, Kirkpatrick stressed the importance of making connections between different majors and tracks of education.

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