Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Diego. His books include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His forthcoming book, Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic will be published by Oxford University Press. He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002). He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He lives in Solana Beach, California with his wife, Lori Chamberlin, and their grandson, Shiloh. SPONSORS Program for the Study of Religion PROGRAM ORGANIZER Babak Rahimi Associate Professor, Literature Department Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program