Education
PhD summa cum laude, Institute of English Studies, Université de Neuchâtel
Dissertation Title: Mysterious Geography: Elizabeth Bishop and the Mediations of Place
Thesis Supervisor: Patrick Vincent
Committee: Stephanie Burt (Harvard) and Jonathan Ellis (University of Sheffield)
Abstract:
This thesis begins with the questions: (1) How does change of place affect a writer’s poetics? and (2) How is that change mediated through writing? Elizabeth Bishop’s move to Brazil and the combination of her published literary works, correspondence, and archival materials provide a rich set of materials for a case study on the topic of change of place and poetics. This thesis argues that for Bishop: (1) mediation of a new place requires surprising intersections between place and memory, and (2) change of place reinforces her poetics of juxtaposition. Over the course of Bishop’s Brazilian years, juxtaposition provides a vehicle for her mediation of the new place while her ability to incorporate her Brazilian experiences into her compositions through juxtaposition simultaneously reveals her deepening understanding of the nuances of Brazilian life, demonstrating her evolution from tourist to dweller.
Theoretically, this thesis establishes the concepts of place and mediation within constructivist and experiential frameworks and proposes that mediation of place can be seen through the process of writing and revision. This, in turn, can be visualized through a combination of digital humanities deep mapping and genetic criticism. Bishop’s early approaches to mediating Brazil included repurposing material she had composed in Nova Scotia to a Brazilian context, attempting to physically situate her poetry, and limiting the geographic scope of her compositions. Her Brazilian poems were completed in short bursts of productivity that were interspersed with longer “fallow” periods during which she wrote prose. These pauses represent periods of “poetic instability” that were followed by stable periods when Bishop realized changes to her poetic mediation of a new place. Writing prose let Bishop experiment with new techniques while also providing an alternate approach to mediating place. Bishop’s literary works interrogate the disjunction between place and the idea of the place, and her late Brazilian poems directly engage this disparity.
MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, Vermont College of Union Institute and University
Creative Thesis Advisor: Tim Wynne-Jones
First-Third Semester Advisors: Cynthia Leitich Smith, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Brent Hartinger
MA in English, Creative Writing Program (Poetry), Boston University
Thesis Supervisors: Robert Pinsky and Rosanna Warren
SM in Media Arts and Science, Future of Learning Group, Media Lab, MIT
Thesis Title: Full-Contact Poetry
Advisor: David Cavallo
Committee: Edith Ackermann and Glorianna Davenport
BA magna cum laude, departmental honors in English and CS, Wellesley College
Computer Science Thesis Advisor: Jennifer Stephan
English Thesis Advisor: Frank Bidart
Academic Papers and Conferences
Sempere, Anindita Basu, and Andrew Sempere. 2023. “Deep Maps, Authorship, and Narrativizing Physical Spaces,” in “DH Unbound 2022, Selected Papers,” ed. Barbara Bordalejo, Roopika Risam, and Emmanuel Château-Dutier, special issue. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 13(3): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.9662.
Sempere, A. Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Riverman”: A Story of Appropriation and of Vocation. In Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, Volume 42, Winter 2023, pp. 159 - 173. https://doi.org/10.33675/SPELL/2023/42/13
Sempere, A. Manuscripts and Metadata as 'Objects to think with.' The Association for Computers and the Humanities, June 2023.
Sempere, A. Elizabeth Bishop's Queer Phenomenology. American Literature Association, Boston, Massachusetts, May 2023.
Sempere, A. Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Riverman”: A Story of Appropriation and of Vocation. Swiss Association for North American Studies, Fribourg, Switzerland, November 2022.
Sempere, A. Review of Apparently Personal Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Biography, 9-10 June 2022. Elizabeth Bishop Society, September 2022.
Sempere, A. "On the Prince of Fundy." Apparently Personal Poetry: A Symposium on Elizabeth Bishop and Biography, Oxford, England, June 2022.
Sempere, A and Sempere, A. Deep Maps, Authorship, and Narrativizing Physical Spaces. The Association for Computers and the Humanities, DH Unbound, May 2022.
Sempere, A. The Path from Sable Island to Santos. Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, Boston, Massachusetts, March 2020.
Sempere, A. Changing Places: Using Spatio-Temporal Maps to Link Literary Texts with Movement.The Association for Computers and the Humanities, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 2019.
Cavallo, D., Papert, S., Sipitakiat, A., Basu, A., Bryant, S., Welti-Santos, L., Maloney, J., Chen, S., Asmussen, E., Solomon, C., Ackermann, E. RoBallet: Exploring Learning through Expression in the Arts through Constructing in a Technologically Immersive Environment. In International Conference on the Learning Sciences Proceedings, Santa Monica, California, June 2004.
Cavallo, D., Sipitakiat, A., Basu, A., Bryant, S. Opening Pathways to Higher Education through Engineering Projects. In American Society for Engineering Education Proceedings, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 2004. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--13414
Cavallo, D., Blikstein, P., Sipitakiat, A., Basu, A., Camargo, A., Lopes, R., Cavallo, A., The City that We Want: Generative Themes, Constructionist Technologies and School/Social Change. International Workshop on Technology for Education in Developing Countries, Joensuu, Finland, August 2004. https://doi.org/10.1109/icalt.2004.1357744
Basu, A. Full-Contact Poetry: Creating Space for Expression. In Eurologo Proceedings, Porto, Portugal, 2003, pp. 323-333.
Basu, A. and Cavallo, D. Full-Contact Poetry: Creating Space for Poetic Collaboration. In Computer Support for Collaborative Learning Proceedings, Bergen, Norway, 2003, pp. 281-285. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0195-2_35
Basu, A. and Cavallo, D. Children as Designers of Full-Contact Poetry. In Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment Proceedings, Darmstadt, Germany, 2003, pp. 328-336.
Cassell, J., Ananny, M., Basu, A., Bickmore, T., Chong, P., Mellis, D., Ryokai, K., Smith, J., Vilhjalmsson, H., Yan, H. Shared Reality: Physical Collaboration with a Virtual Peer. ACM CHI 2000 Conference Proceedings, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1145/633292.633443
Invited Talks and Workshops
Expository Writing Worshop for Digital Ideation students at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. May 3, 2022.
Mapping Bishop: A Case Study on the Dialogue between Software Models and Literary Analysis at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures in Basel, Switzerland. June 3, 2020.
Visualizing Literary Creation: Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Digital Humanities at Wellesley College. March 9, 2020.
Writing for Designers: Intro to Narrative Structure and Style at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. November 5-8, 2018.
Place in Fiction for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in Switzerland. September 12, 2017.
Direct Encounters with History: Summer of Darkness and the Performance of Archive at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Final lecture in the Data is Made Up of Stories: University-wide Futures from the Digital Humanities series. December 5, 2016.
