Katherine DimmeryN.E.H Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics

Katie Dimmery is an anthropologist of language, poetics, and more-than-human relation in Southwest China.

Her current book project, Narrating Heartache, explores how poetic genres in an indigenous Naish-speaking community have been reworked across 20th- and 21st-century Chinese state projects of revolution, modernization, and heritage revival. She draws on cultural and linguistic anthropology to ask how ceremonial texts and other poetic forms shape social personhood over time— not only at the level of content, but in the formal and deictic structures that shape what it means to “voice” a life.