MCSI Lecture Series Presents: Lucy Alford

Lecture: "Attention's Limits: Details in Periphery"

This talk explores how poems and paintings register human suffering as peripheral detail—felt but often unseen. Attending to Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship alongside W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, I consider how works of art frame disaster in the margins, and how attention itself becomes ethically fraught. What happens when the moment of crisis is barely noticed? What possibilities arise when we pause, look again, and linger in the corner of the frame—where the body enters the water, or the detail refuses to stay background?

Lucy Alford is Associate Professor of Literature at Wake Forest University, specializing in modern and contemporary poetics. Her books include Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia University Press, 2020) and the poetry collection Daylight / Savings (Black Square Editions, forthcoming 2026).