"Poetics of Personhood" considers a problem raised several decades ago by Barbara Johnson, which remains understudied: what is the relationship between the poetic person and the legal person? Students in this course will examine theories of personhood, drawing on Enlightenment and liberal accounts by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, G.W.F. Hegel, and C.B. MacPherson; and critiques of personhood leveraged within the interdisciplines of critical race theory and Black studies by Sylvia Wynter, Cheryl I. Harris, Hortense Spillers, and Alexander Weheliye. Alongside these, we will read key texts on lyric poetry that consider the place of the person within this genre: selected critics will include John Emil Vincent, Jonathan Culler, Virginia Jackson, and others. The course will culminate with three case studies of poems drawn from different national/linguistic traditions: possible texts include Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip (Tobago/Canada), Freedom & Prostitution by Cassandra Troyan (US/Sweden), and Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil (India/UK).