I am an Associate Professor of English at Villanova University, where I work on the history of poetry and poetics, with a particular emphasis on the poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first century United States. How does poetry emerge out of modern life, out of social relations, out of institutional arrangements? What forms of life—what forms of thinking, of feeling, of belonging—does poetry make possible? These are the major questions my work addresses.
My first book, Institutionalized Lyric (forthcoming, Oxford UP), offers a new account of midcentury US poetry, one that sees the increasingly institutional positioning of poetry, its sponsorship by universities and offices of state, and the sudden prominence, in the lives of poets and as a subject for poetry, of the experiences of breakdown and psychiatric institutionalization as two sides of the same coin. My book argues that the period’s autobiographical lyric bears the marks of its paradoxically doubled institutional provenance: midcentury poets learned how to write autobiographically, I argue, not by breaking free of impersonal institutions but instead by absorbing the lessons those institutions had delivered so as to make their own lives ramify as objects of institutional scrutiny.
My essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Point, PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, The Yale Review, and in several edited anthologies. My essay on Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the whiteness of lyric received the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize, given annually to an “outstanding article” published in PMLA. My research has been supported by fellowships at the Beinecke Library and the Harry Ransom Center. With Robert Volpicelli, I am coeditor of “Poetry Networks,” a special issue of the journal College Literature. I’ve also begun to write a book on poetry and the Iranian diaspora. Tentatively titled “The Relational Past,” this project braids together literary criticism, family memoir, and translation in order to explore the capacity of poetry to stage imperfect, often contrafactual, forms of being together for people whom history and politics have riven apart.
At Villanova, I’ve designed and taught a range of courses on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics in both our undergraduate and graduate programs. At the undergraduate level, I also enjoy teaching introductory courses in literary studies as a part of our core curriculum. In our graduate program, I regularly advise Master’s theses and field exams in modern and contemporary literature and poetry. My teaching at Villanova has been recognized with the Bridgebuilder Award, given annually to a professor who “goes above and beyond the call of duty to lend support, assistance, and guidance” to students with disabilities.
Before coming to Villanova, I taught at Connecticut College and Pomona College. I received my PhD in 2008 from Yale University. I was born in Los Angeles and then spent my first 18 months in Iran, before returning to Southern California, where I grew up. Today, I live just outside of Philadelphia.
Acknowledgements
Cover Image: “Birdcage on Mallorca – 1951,” by James Merrill. That image—and the contact sheet in the banner, also by Merrill—are gratefully reproduced with permission of James Merrill’s Literary Executor and James Merrill’s Literary Estate at Washington University at St. Louis
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