My Expertise
I like to think about poetry—about how poems help us think, about how poems are put together, about the history of all those strange and wonderful things called "poem", and about the history which binds poems to society at large. My research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth century poetry and poetics, and especially on modernism. I'm interested in the intersections of poetry with philosophy and with religion; in the history and theory of verse-making; and in cultures of publication and circulation. I am currently working on a history of the concept of poetic technique.
Most recently, I edited the Cambridge Companion to the Poem (2024). In Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World (Cambridge University Press, 2017), I argue that the formal experiments of modernist poems by T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Mina Loy, Joseph Macleod, and Wallace Stevens figure poetry itself as complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of modernity. In W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (Ashgate, 2011), I examine the association of poetry with paradise which shaped the development of Yeats's and Pound's poetry. With Ben Etherington, I co-edited a special issue of Critical Quarterly on Historical Poetics and the Problem of Exemplarity (2019) and, with David Trotter, I co-edited a collection of essays on literature and technology, Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (Open Humanities Press, 2016). My essays have appeared in journals such as ELH, Modernism/modernity, The Review of English Studies, Essays in Criticism, and Victorian Studies, as well as in several edited collections.
Keywords
Fields of Research (FoR)
Literary studies, British and Irish literature, North American literature, Literary theorySEO tags
Biography
I am an Associate Professor in English in the School of the Arts and Media. I received my BA and MPhil from the University of Sydney and my PhD from the University of Cambridge. I joined UNSW in 2008 on a Faculty Postdoctoral Fellowship. I was appointed a Lecturer in English in 2010 and then awarded a three-year ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2011. I was Acting Director (2014) and then Deputy Director (2016) of the Centre for Modernism...view more
I am an Associate Professor in English in the School of the Arts and Media. I received my BA and MPhil from the University of Sydney and my PhD from the University of Cambridge. I joined UNSW in 2008 on a Faculty Postdoctoral Fellowship. I was appointed a Lecturer in English in 2010 and then awarded a three-year ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2011. I was Acting Director (2014) and then Deputy Director (2016) of the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at UNSW, and since 2013 I have been a co-editor of Affirmations: of the modern, an open-access journal of modern literature and culture and the official journal of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network. I am an active member of UNSW's Literary Provocations Hub.
I like to think about poetry—about how poems help us think, about how poems are put together, about the history of all those strange and wonderful things called "poem", and about the history which binds poems to society at large. My research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth century poetry and poetics, and especially on modernism. I'm interested in the intersections of poetry with philosophy and with religion; in the history and theory of verse-making; and in cultures of publication and circulation. I am currently working on a history of the concept of poetic technique.
Most recently, I edited the Cambridge Companion to the Poem (2024). In Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World (Cambridge University Press, 2017), I argue that the formal experiments of modernist poems by T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Mina Loy, Joseph Macleod, and Wallace Stevens figure poetry itself as complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of modernity. In W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (Ashgate, 2011), I examine the association of poetry with paradise which shaped the development of Yeats's and Pound's poetry. With Ben Etherington, I co-edited a special issue of Critical Quarterly on Historical Poetics and the Problem of Exemplarity (2019) and, with David Trotter, I co-edited a collection of essays on literature and technology, Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (Open Humanities Press, 2016). My essays have appeared in journals such as ELH, Modernism/modernity, The Review of English Studies, Essays in Criticism, and Victorian Studies, as well as in several edited collections.
My Qualifications
BA (Hons 1) USyd. (2000); MPhil USyd. (2003); PhD Cantab. (2007).
My Research Supervision
Areas of supervision
I am interested in supervising Honours, Masters, and PhD theses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and in modernist literature, broadly conceived.
My Engagement
I am co-editor of Affirmations: of the modern.
I peer-review work for numerous presses (including Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury, and Open Humanities Press) and journals (including Modernism/modernity, Paideuma, Irish Studies Review, and Religion and Literature).
My Teaching
I teach ARTS2033 Poetry and Poetics and ARTS2034 Shakespearean Drama. Occasionally I contribute lectures to, or take seminars in, other courses in English.
PhD Supervisions
Rebecca Zhou, "Ideogrammic Poetry in the Time of Semiocapital" (2024)
Mariya Nikolova, "How Whiteness Claimed the Future. The Always New Vs. the Always Now in US-American Literature" (2020)
Tanya Thaweeskulchai, "Expressing Bodily Experience: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and The Waves" (2018), together with the poetry collections A Salivating Monstrous Plant (Cordite, 2017) and Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits (2018).
Christopher Oakey, "Philosophical Poetry in a Time of Crisis: Reading Post-War American Poetry in Relation to Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy" (2017)
Masters by Research Supervisions
Kristin Grogan, "Strange Rhythms: Experimental Lyric Poetry in Late Modernism" (2014)
Christopher Oakey, "Vision, Affect and Knowledge in the Poetry of Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams" (2012)
Publications
ORCID as entered in ROS
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9287-9742
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