Boasian Verse explores the understudied poetic output of three major twentieth-century anthropologists: Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead.

Philipp Schweighauser is Professor of North American and General Literature at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He received his PhD in Anglophone Literary Studies from the same university. After a research stay at the University of California, Irvine (2000-2001), a postdoc position at the University of Berne (2003-2007), and an assistant professorship at the University of Göttingen (2007-2009), he returned to the University of Basel in 2009. From 2012 to 2020, Schweighauser served as the president of the Swiss Association for North American Studies. He is the co-editor of eight edited volumes or special issues and the author of two monographs: Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (U of Virginia P, 2016) and The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (UP Florida, 2006).

Introduction

1. Soothing Blindness, Piercing Insight: Ruth Benedict's Verse

Concealing Disclosures

Yearning for Lost Plenitude

Of Syncretisms, Foils, and Cautionary Examples

2. Margaret Mead: How to Make It New, Differently

Reinventing the Social World

Toward an Anthropology of the Senses

The Public and the Private, In and Out of Verse

3. Exerting Poetic License: Edward Sapir's Poetry

Little Canadian Flowers

Poetry Magazine

Playing Seriously with Genres

Of Desert Sirens

Conclusion