As scholars and students, our research, writing, teaching, and learning center variously on inquiries in and through poetics, including intersections of literacy and numeracy in medieval lists; Renaissance rhetoric, poetics, and grammar; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of orality and literacy; British romantic poetics; nineteenth-century U.S. poetry and poetics; modernisms; contemporary transnational literature and culture; Nuyorican poetries; African American/Caribbean poetries; Latinx/hemispheric poetries; postcolonial poetries and poetics; ecopoetics; paleopoetics; mnemonics; coteries; war culture; poetics of violence; poetics of surveillance. We pursue questions of poiesis as they intersect with (e.g.) cultural history, art history, archives, histories of reading, ethnography, historiography, lowercase theory, Black reading, material culture, text and image, mediality, social media, performance, recitation and memorization, disability, geopoetics, urban space, translation/ality, and translingual poetics.
Scholars and students in NYU English variously convene in poetry/poetics workshops and collaborate with several programs and groups, including:
The Advanced Certificate Program in Poetics and Theory at NYU
Working Groups: Creative Writing; 18th and 19th Century Literature; Modern and Contemporary Colloquium
Books and articles by current faculty include:
Patricia Crain, "The Literary Property of Childhood: The Case of the 'Babes in the Wood’” and “Bedtime Stories” in Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America
Patrick Deer, “Beyond Recovery: Representing History and Memory in Iraq War Writing”; “Mapping Contemporary American War Culture”; Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature
Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England; Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms (with D. Sarkar); The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime
Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry; “This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past Twenty Years”; Romanticism and the Human Sciences: poetry, population, and the discourse of the species; “Compositionism: Plants, Poetics, Possibilities”; “Divagations on Rhyme,” in On Rhyme; “Wordsworth, or Now”; “British Romantic Homer” (with L. Slatkin); “Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760-1830”; “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” (with C. Langan); “Romanticism, or, Now: Learning to Read in Postmodern”; More Anon: Selected Poems; What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems; Some Say: poems; Mz N: the serial; My Poets; This Blue: poems; World Enough: poems; Same Life: poems
Haruko Momma, “Old English Poetic Form: Genre, Style, Prosody”; “The Old English Metrical Psalms: Practice and Theory of Translation,” in Early English Poetic Culture and Meter: The Influence of G. R. Russom; “Metre vs. Rhythm: John C. Pope Reads Sievers” (forthcoming); From Philology to English Studies; The Composition of Old English Poetry
Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam; Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha; “The Queer Migrant Poetics of #Latinx Instagram”; Transversal: poems
Zakir Paul (Comparative Literature, Associated Faculty in English), Reading after Blanchot, SubStance special issue; “Demons of Analogy: Likeness and Photography in Bruges-la-morte” Romanic Review; “Walter Benjamin and Political Style” Germanic Review; Translations, Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art; Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953-1993.
Sonya Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature; “Gwendolyn Brooks: Riot after the New Negro Renaissance”; “Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive”; “A Language for Grieving”
Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem
Martha Dana Rust, Blog: Listology: exploring lists in all their possibilities (with Amanda Gerber and Eva von Contzen); “Ensembles de dix, sept, et cinq: le pouvoir de la cardinalité d’une liste”; “‘Qui bien aime a tarde oblie’: Lemmata and Lists in the Parliament of Fowls”; Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Middle English Culture (forthcoming)
Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie; Fieldwork: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics; Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research; “Pasolini’s Homemade Historiography”; “Robertson’s Research”: “Framing the Lyric”
Recent graduate classes:
Word and Image, Patricia Crain
War and the Avant Garde, Patrick Deer and Peter Nicholls
War Culture, Patrick Deer
Lyric Dis/contents: Romanticisms, Modernisms, Now, Maureen N. McLane
Some Contemporary Poetries, mainly in English, Maureen N. McLane
Latin@ Poetry and the Translingual Americas, Urayoán Noel
Problems in Poetics, Zakir Paul
Relational Modes from Romanticism to Present, Zakir Paul
Black Poetry and Social Movements, Sonya Posmentier
Text and Image in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Martha Rust
Poetry and Audio Research, Lytle Shaw
Postwar Visual Poetics, Lytle Shaw
Theorizing the Archive, Lytle Shaw
Poetry in English Since WWII, Lytle Shaw
Theorizing Fiction in the Early Modern World, Jenny Mann
Current and Upcoming graduate classes:
Emily Dickinson, Patricia Crain (Spring 2022)
War and the Avant Garde, Patrick Deer (Spring 2022)
Poetics of the Fragment, Zakir Paul (Fall 2021)
Literature and Sites of Civil Rights, Sonya Posmentier (Fall 2021)
Medieval Miscellaneity, Martha Rust (Fall 2021)
Recent books by NYU PhDs:
E. G. Asher, Natality
David Hobbs, 21 Poems by George Oppen: Bernadette Mayer (co-edited cluster of essays in Post45)
MC Hyland, The End
Yohei Igarashi, The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication
Zane Koss, Harbour Grids
Shiv Kotecha, The Switch; Extrigue
Vladimir Lucien, Sounding Ground; Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of Saint Lucia (co-editor)
Luke McMullan, Ruin; Dolphin Aria/Limited Hours: A Love Song
John Melillo, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Daniel C. Remein, Treatise on the Marvelous for Prestigious Museums; Pearl; Picket songs
Ada Smailbegović, Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds