Thalia Field is a writer working in interdisciplinary arts -- extending experimental fiction to multi-media and experimental performance. She has particular interests in animal stuides, ecology, and environmental poetics, Buddhist poetics and philosophy, as well as history of science and art.

EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS (A Reality Fiction), a book-length essay/fiction epic takes as its starting point, the life and work of French physiologist Claude Bernard, his wife Fanny and their children, and a handful of historical characters from 2nd Empire and 3eme Republic Paris. Combining historical and imaginative work, the book explores the origins of the "laboratory" and "experimental medicine" as they came to define science and fueled aesthetic thought in the modern period.

POINT AND LINE (New Directions, 2000) is a collection of experimental prose, poetry, and drama, exploring the nature of language as it is used to identify characters and dramatic events. Combining a multitude of different "discourse fields" each piece creates a linguistic frame in which the impossibility and failure of "self" is dramatized. Pieces in the collection can be considered prose, poetry, lyric essay, or drama.

INCARNATE:STORY MATERIAL (New Directions, 2004) collects a series of poetic, dramatic, and lyric essay works, each formally distinct and concerned with the ways in which being embodied, framed, named, and attached to "biography" serves to trouble narratives and language. More formally amorphous than the first collection, this book moves freely between birth, death, cartography, and issues of survival which move far beyond the human in scale.

ULULU (Clown Shrapnel) is a full-length experimental novel, almost a "performance," which dramatizes the character "Lulu" -- from Wedekind's Erdgeist plays and Berg's opera -- to trace the history of the archetype as it winds through the cultural history of Europe in the nineteenth/early twentieth century. Focusing on the movement from commedia to clowning, the book also fragments biography and history into shards and shreds of a thousand-and-one lies and secret stories.

A PRANK OF GEORGES, co-authored with French writer Abigail Lang, is a lyric essay exploring Gertrude Stein's use of proper names, and philosophical fun with the conflict between individual identity and group thinking.

LEAVE TO REMAIN, Dalkey Archive Press

EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS (A Reality Fiction) Solid Objects Press, NY

BIRD LOVERS, BACKYARD New Directions Publishing Corp, NY

A PRANK OF GEORGES, Essay Press

ULULU (CLOWN SHRAPNEL)
(Coffee House Press)

INCARNATE:STORY MATERIAL (New Directions)

POINT AND LINE (New Directions)

 

Joukowsky Assistant Professor, Brown University, 2004
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Opera Commission, 1993

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)

My teaching focuses on interdisciplinary arts, the practice and study of art/artists who work/have worked outside the traditions of any one genre. My courses tend to focus on writing as a core practice, with exploration of text in sculptural, environmental, performance and multi-media directions. Other aspects of my teaching include collaborative and innovative classroom techniques, as well as an approach to writing which encourages personalized research into both familiar and unfamiliar areas. Specific artists I have an interest in teaching in extended seminars include John Cage, Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht. Also, I teach environmental and eco-poetics, animal studies, as well as contemplative/awareness practice approaches to writing.