Faculty Profiles

My research and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, modernism, queer literature, Marxism (especially Marxist feminism) and American literature. I'm particularly interested in the social life of modern 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 and a Q&A about the book at the Columbia University Press blog.

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 richness of this history has been obscured by the dominant narrative that describes modernism in terms of the emergence of a professional literary class. Emphasizing unseen and undervalued labors and braiding close reading with a Marxist-feminist approach, Stitch, Unstitch argues that modernist poetry is a formally complex archive of thought about the meaning of work and life beyond work.

My essays have appeared 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 New York School poet Bernadette Mayer. For that issue, I wrote a short essay on Mayer's late poetry, gardening, property, and the Georgic.

I've published reviews and interviews in public-facing venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and interviews elsewhere - with Sarah Schulman in The White Review and Eileen Myles in The Oxonian Review. You can listen to me talk about the poem "Poet's Work" by Lorine Niedecker on the podcast Close Readings and about Ezra Pound and fascist poetry on This Guy Sucked.

My current projects include a short book of creative criticism on Sylvia Plath's Ariel, under advance contract with Amherst College Press in their Re/Verse series. 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 "Minor Action and Collective Life", about social interdependence and the lyric poem since 1968.

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.