Faculty

 

 

 

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LUCY ALFORD

Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities

Lucy Alford specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and poetics, with additional foci in modern and contemporary poetries in English, Arabic, French, and German. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, where she held the Ric Weiland Fellowship and spent a year at the Stanford Humanities Center as a Geballe Fellow. Before Stanford, she received an MLitt by Research and first PhD from the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Modern Thought, with a dissertation on problems in post-foundational ethics. Her book, Forms of Poetic Attention (forthcoming, Columbia University Press), is a transhistorical exploration of the particular modes of attention poems both produce and require. Her scholarly work has appeared in Philosophy & Literature, Dibur, and Modern Language Notes, and her poems have been published in The Warwick Review and Harpur Palate. She is currently at work on two creative projects: Annals, a poetic exploration of the passage of time, and On X, a collection of poems inspired by the essays of Montaigne.

RACHEL GALVIN

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Associate Director, Program in Creative Writing

Rachel Galvin’s collection Elevated Threat Level (Green Lantern Press, 2018) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Alice James Books Kinereth Gensler Award. Other books of poetry include Pulleys & Locomotion (Black Lawrence Press) and a chapbook, Zoetrope (Editores Chätaro). Her translation of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (Carcanet) won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation and was named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013 by the Boston Globe. In 2018 she published Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo (Open Letter Books), translated with Harris Feinsod, and her translation of Cowboy & Other Poems, a chapbook by Alejandro Albarrán Polanco, is forthcoming in 2019 (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems and translations appear in journals including Bennington Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney’s, Narrative, The Nation, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. Rachel is the author of a monograph, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford UP, 2018), and co-editor of an essay collection, Auden at Work (Palgrave, 2015). She is a founding member of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective (www.outranspo.com), and is affiliated with UChicago’s Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

EDGAR GARCIA

Assistant Professor of English

Edgar Garcia teaches, researches, and writes about hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the twentieth century. His inquiries have mostly taken place in the fields of indigenous and Latino studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. The book that he is currently working on, Deep Land: Hemispheric Modernisms and Indigenous Media, explores the reception of indigenous cultures of the Americas by Anglo and Latino modernists of the twentieth century as their attempt to forge poetic communities alternative to national paradigms. This scholarly work-in-progress has its wandering doppelgänger in an ongoing creative work, Partial Animals: A Collection of Stories, Songs, Artifacts, Images, and Poems Documenting the Anthropogenic Climate Interference, which investigates in practice the poetic forms whose critical tensions animate Garcia's scholarly work.

 

ALISON JAMES

 Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literature

Alison James’s field of research is twentieth and twenty-first century French literature, with a particular focus on postwar experimental writing (both poetry and prose), the Oulipo group, representations of everyday life, and connections between literature and philosophy. Her book Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern University Press, 2009) considers Perec’s use of formal and semantic constraints both as a spur to literary inspiration and as a means of exploring the tension between chance and determinism, fate and human agency. Her current book project examines documentary tendencies in modern and contemporary French literature. In the area of poetry and poetics, she has recently published articles on the contemporary French poet Jacques Roubaud, conceptions of form in French and American avant-garde poetics, and the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s approach to 19th-century French poetry. Her teaching at the University of Chicago includes courses on the literary avant-garde and on encounters between poetry and philosophy in postwar France.

 

MARK PAYNE

Professor of Classics

Mark Payne is Professor in the Department of Classics, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and the College. He is the author of numerous articles on Greek poetry and its reception, from Romanticism to the present. His first book, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His second book, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010 and received the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. He has taught classes on Greek and Roman poetry, Wordsworth (with Wendy Olmsted), and postwar French avant-garde poetry (with Alison James), as well as directed readings on the animal poetry of modernism. This spring he will teach a class on Hölderlin and the Greeks with Christopher Wild from the department of Germanic Studies.

 

SARAH NOOTER

Assistant Professor of Classics

Sarah Nooter (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2008) is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which examines lyricism in the voice of Sophocles’ heroes. Her interests include poetry in drama, ancient Greek lyric poetry, and contemporary poetry, as well as their intersection in translations and adaptations. She is currently working on a project that examines aural aesthetics in Aeschylus and Greek lyric poetry.

 

SRIKANTH "CHICU" REDDY

Associate Professor of English

Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry--"Facts for Visitors" and "Voyager" (both published by the University of California Press)--as well as a scholarly study, "Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry" (Oxford University Press, 2012).  He has written on contemporary poetry for various publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, and Lana Turner.  He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop.  In fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy is an Associate Professor in English and at the College.

NA'AMA ROKEM

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations

Na'ama Rokem is Associate Professor in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Comparative Literature, and the director of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on Hebrew and German-Jewish literature and the cultural history of Zionism. Her current research projects deal with bilingualism, self translation, and poetry.

 

HAUN SAUSSY

Professor of Comparative Literature

Haun Saussy writes on various kinds of poetry: Chinese classical poetry, Imagist verse, translation into and out of English, Baudelaire, oral epic, Caribbean lyric. Some of this has been published in the following forms: The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, about the early poetic collection Shi jing; The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, critical edition edited with Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein; the introduction to Timothy Billings and Chris Bush, trs., Victor Segalen: Stèles; "Death and Translation" (Representations); and translations from the Haitian poets René Depestre, René Bélance and Jean Métellus. He teaches in the department of Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and keeps an eye out for poetic events on the south side of Chicago.

 

JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE

Associate Professor of English

Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar devoted to the cross-contamination of these modes of inquiry. Her poetics encompass other nonlinguistic or semilinguistic forms of making such as filming, ripping, pixelating, gluing, salvage, sewing, soundscape production, durational gesture, and choral song, often in relation to documentary projects. Her poetry collections include From Dame Quickly (published by Litmus Press in 2009) and the cross-media book The Republic of EXIT 43: Outtakes and Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, forthcoming in Fall 2016 from Atelos Press. She is the author of several chapbooks: Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e chap kollektiv, 2007), Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007), and Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale (La Camera Verde, 2008)translated into Italian in dialogue with Marco Giovenale. She edited Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (Belladonna, 2009), featuring her pop-ups and prose and new writing by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian. Her poetry is featured in a range of anthologies, including The Best American Experimental Writing 2016, edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracy Morris (forthcoming); Novas Poéticas de Resistência/Poetics of Resistance, edited by Graça Capinha; EX_IT: Materiali fuori contesto (La Colornese—Tielleci, 2013), Emergency Index, a documentary performance anthology (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), La alteración del silencio: Poesía norteamericana reciente (Das Kapital, 2010), and The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004). She has been a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, the Millay Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the interdisciplinary Nature, Art, & Habitat residency, the iLAND foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the American Academy in Rome.

Her translations from the Italian of the polyglot poet and musicologist Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, and won the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Translation Prize; she is now at work on translations of the futurist F.T. Marinetti and feminist Carla Lonzi. She founded, and now curates, PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the audiovisual archive based at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to experimental Italian poetry.  

Recent writings can be found in journals such as alfabeta2, Asymptote, Boston Review, boundary2, Critical Inquiry, Jacket2, Nuovi argomenti, and PMLA, and at Harriet: The Blog. Installation pieces were exhibited most recently at Una Vetrina Gallery in Rome and WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, and she has collaborated on multidisciplinary performance works with a wide range of musicians, architects, and dancers: on performances of Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble (Marco Ariano, Renato Ciunfrini, Roberto Fega); on the performance work PARK, with choreographer Kathy Westwater and architect Seung Jae Lee, presented in 2010-13 at Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts, Reed College, Movement Research, LentSpace, Pratt Institute, and Fresh Kills Landfill; and X Locus, twinned installations for the courtyard and tract of Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome, designed with AGENCY Architecture (Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller) and composer Paul Rudy, in 2011. She is currently sharing a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship with the code artist Judd Morrissey and cross-media artist Caroline Bergvall at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry to work on a project exploring the poetics and politics of air called The Data That We Breathe

Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Veniceher study of the outmoded city of lagoons as a crucible for experiments across literature, politics, urbanism, and the visual arts, was published by Columbia University Press in 2014, and received Honorable Mention in the Modernist Studies Association’s annual book award competition. She is also Associate Professor of English and Romance Languages and Literatures and a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

 

 

ROSANNA WARREN

Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor

Rosanna Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Photo courtesy of Joel Cohen.

 

JOHN WILKINSON

Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing and Poetics

John Wilkinson's most recent books of poetry are Ghost Nets (Omnidawn 2016) and Reckitt's Blue (Seagull 2013). A selected poems, Schedule of Unrest, was published by Salt in 2015. Born in London and educated at Cambridge and Harvard, he worked in mental health services in the industrial West Midlands, South Wales and the East End of London before moving to the University of Notre Dame as Writer in Residence in 2005. He joined the English Department at Chicago in 2010 as Professor of Practice in the Arts and is now full Professor. As well as eleven books of poetry and several chapbooks, he has also published a critical collection, The Lyric Touch (Salt 2007) and many subsequent critical essays on modernist and contemporary British and American poetry and painting. 

 

DAVID WRAY

Associate Professor of Classics

LYNN XU

Collegiate Assistant Professor in Poetry

Lynn Xu is the author of Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation. For her doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley, she was awarded a William L. Magistretti Fellowship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Xu has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Brown University, and is an editor at Canarium Books.