The Ends of Prosody

Edited, developed, and maintained since 2007, the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA) is a dynamic collection of historical documents about the study of poetry, pronunciation, and versification from 1559 to 1927. The PPA is the most comprehensive collection of historical texts about English-language prosody – or prosody in any modern language – in the world. Its combined scale and precision enable scholars to pose entirely new research questions of poetic and prosodic history. The PPA was developed at The Center for Digital Humanities, celebrating its 10th anniversary in the academic year 2024-25. To commemorate this historic year, which coincides with the completion of the PPA’s development, we are bringing together literary, computational, and literary-computational scholars in a unified conference: The Ends of Prosody.

The Ends of Prosody celebrates the breadth of research the PPA enables, forging new intersections between disciplines. In an initial PPA computational workshop, scholars from the computational strand of the conference will be invited to explore the PPA’s data and propose essays based on their findings. A series of panels will follow, composed of scholars invited to present their research on prosody, undertaken using the PPA. To conclude the conference, a series of lightning talks will unite these approaches to the archive, meditating on the ways in which we might conceive of poetry as data.

This conference is made possible by the support of the Princeton University Humanities Council and the Bain-Swiggett Fund of the Department of English.

Program details and an RSVP form to follow.