Faculty Profiles

My research and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, modernism, and American literature. I'm particularly interested in the social forms of poetry. 

My first book, Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work, is out with Columbia University Press (Modernist Latitudes Series). You can read an extract from Chapter Three, on Black labor unions and the blues poem, in Lit Hub. Stitch, Unstitch argues that modernist poetry was shaped by a deep entanglement with a world governed by work and work-based values, and that the rich variety of this history has been obscured by the dominance of a narrative that describes modernism in terms of the emergence of a professional literary class. I blend fine-grained close readings of my central poets - Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Lorine Niedecker, Lola Ridge, and Gertrude Stein - with an expansive materialist approach that considers a range of non-poetic objects: household ephemera, Constructivist set design and flying machines, photography, homemade books, love notes, and cookbooks. Emphasizing unseen and undervalued labors, I excavate modernist poetry as a formally complex archive of thought about the meaning of work and life beyond work.

My essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary History, American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Post45, as well as several edited collections, including The Cambridge Companion to the Poem. With David Hobbs, I am the editor of a special cluster of Post 45 Contemporaries on the poet Bernadette Mayer. For that issue, I wrote a short essay on Mayer's late poetry, growing a garden, property, rent, and the Georgic.

I've published reviews and interviews in public-facing venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and The White Review. You can listen to me talk about the poem "Poet's Work" by Lorine Niedecker on the podcast Close Readings.

My current projects include a short book on Sylvia Plath's Ariel and the challenges and pleasures of reading Plath as a poet (rather than as biography). With Christian Gelder, I'm co-editing a special issue of Women's Writing on the poet Laura Riding. I'm in the early stages of a new project, tentatively titled "Poetry in Secret", on poetry, opacity, and everyday refusal.

I did my undergraduate work in English and French at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. I then did my DPhil at Exeter College, Oxford, where I was a Clarendon Scholar, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge.