Photo: Stephen Garrett
As a scholar of poetry and visual culture working across historical periods — antiquity, modernity, and the in-between — I try to understand why we so often confront the world by interrupting our relation to it.
New book
Out April 6th, 2026
“Composed with an electric blend of writerly elegance and moral urgency, this erudite book compels its readers to keep our eyes fixed on its pages.”
— Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University, author of Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature
Upcoming events
Recent events
A public lecture on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Image: Hebrew word panel for the Book of Genesis, featuring Adam and Eve, Ambrosian Tanakh (ca. 1236–38). Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS B.30 inf, fol. 1v) © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mondadori Portfolio
Ben Saltzman in conversation with Ayla Lepine about Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Image: Fransisco Goya, detail from “No hay quien los socorra” (There is No One to Help Them), Plate 60 from Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War) 1863 - The Met.
A public lecture on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Image: Adam and Eve, Junius Manuscript, Oxford, Boolean Library, MS Junius 11, p. 36.
Ben Saltzman in conversation with Megan O’Grady about their new books, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture and How it Feels to be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves.
Looking at medieval images of Adam and Eve in which they are depicted covering their faces and turning away from one another (e.g., in the Junius Manuscript), this paper will think through the queer resonances of their gesture in the work of Nigerian-British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode.
Image: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose I (Bodies of Experience), 1989
A reading and conversation with Edgar Garcia about his Cantares and my Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, followed by a Q&A.
Image: Cherubino Alberti (Zaccaria Mattia) after Polidoro da Caravaggio, The Expulsion from Paradise with an Angel Wielding a Sword Behind Adam and Eve (ca. 1570–1615). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A conversation with Martin Jay on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, followed by a Q&A.
Martin Jay is the Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of nineteen previous books, including The Dialectical Imagination, Marxism and Totality, Downcast Eyes, and Songs of Experience.
Image: Susan Meiselas, Neighbors watch as dead bodies are burned in the streets of Estelí, Nicaragua (1979). Detail.
Ben Saltzman will be in conversation with Mark Greif (Stanford, English) and Miriam Kamil (Stanford, Classics) about Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Discounted copies of Turning Away will be available for purchase.
Image: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875) (detail)
A conversation with Kathleen N. Cruz (UC Davis, Classics) and Elisha Hamlin (UC Davis, English) about Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Followed by a Q&A
Image: Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
A conversation with Bronwen Wilson (UCLA, Art History) and David Russell (UCLA, English) about Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Followed by a Q&A
Image: Fra Angelico and workshop, Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene, and Saint Dominic(ca. 1440–45).
A public lecture followed by a Q&A on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).
A reading and conversation with Poet Richie Hofmann, author of collection The Bronze Arms, and Benjamin A. Saltzman, author of Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Richie Hofmann is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous books, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.
Benjamin A. Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.
A public lecture on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Image: Marc Chagall, detail from Artist with the Yellow Christ (1938) - Private collection.
A public lecture followed by a Q&A on Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Image: Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 in Madrid, or “The Executions” (1814).