Department of English

My research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary poetry in English. I am particularly interested in recent poets who use the special resources of their genre to ask very old questions about knowledge, virtue, justice, and aesthetics.

In my first book, The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Harvard UP, 2016), I explore how twentieth- and twenty-first century American poets have reframed the timeless problem of body and mind, at once cultivating and critiquing our tendency to regard the mind as a part of nature. The book reveals how the discourses of mind science, in ratifying and promoting physiological accounts of inner life, have transformed how poets imagine the deepest emotional and intellectual sources of poetry, reshaping the genre’s themes, forms, and very self-conception. The book was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Prize by Harvard University Press for an outstanding first book across the arts and sciences.

My current book project describes how lyric poetry—the consummate art of invisible, interior worlds—has recently embraced self-consciously and often extravagantly visual forms, presenting itself as a genre to be seen as well as read. Why, I ask, do contemporary poets position readers as spectators of their inner lives? And why do they so often give us the feeling that we are being watched? I propose that twenty-first-century poets are not simply absorbing avant-garde innovations or acceding to the hegemony of visual culture, but are reaching out to graphic forms to grapple with the politics of exhibition and social visibility that have coursed through lyric poetry’s long history of rendering the privacy of the mind available to readers’ hungry eyes. The book aims to define the relationship between how recent poems look on the page and how they look at the world.

I have published essays on a range of topics, including the poetics of epiphany, whiteness in Robert Lowell’s poetry and drama, racialized letterforms, and lyric theory. I teach courses across the English department’s curriculum, from “Introduction to Poetry” and “Introduction to Advanced Literary Study” to recent graduate seminars on “Lyric and Anti-Lyric” and “The Art of Beholding.” For my teaching and research, I have been recognized with IU’s Trustees Teaching Award and Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.