Celebrate the expansion of John Ashbery’s Nest, a website and virtual tour of the late American poet’s Hudson home. Using virtual reality technologies to explore rooms and interact with objects inside the house, Nest enables users to experience the intimacy of being in “the middle of things,” a reality that echoes in Ashbery’s greatest poems.

A collaboration of the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, VR Habitat, and Yale ITS, Nest launched in 2017 with a prototype view of the Center Hall. We are delighted to announce that the site now contains 14 rooms, 232 objects, over 100 poems, and more than 200 audio interview excerpts featuring John Ashbery, his husband David Kermani, and a dozen other artists and scholars.

As part of the launch, Karin Roffman (Principal Investigator for the project and noted Ashbery biographer) will share a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Nest. Along with highlighting some of her favorite discoveries, Roffman will also touch on the ways that Nest can help inform our understanding and appreciation of Ashbery and his poetry.

All are invited to attend. Coffee and refreshments will be available.

Speaker Bio

Karin Roffman is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, English and American Studies at Yale University, where she is creating, “John Ashbery’s Nest,” a website and virtual tour of Ashbery’s Hudson house in collaboration with Monica Ong Reed and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab. Her work on John Ashbery and twentieth- and twenty-first century writers and artists has appeared in Raritan, Modern Fiction Studies, Artforum, Rain Taxi, Yale Review and others. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010) won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize and subsequent publication. She has previously taught at West Point and Bard College.