About

I am an assistant professor of English at Tulane University, where I teach courses in transnational modernism, poetry and poetics, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.

My current book project, The Secret History of Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics 1880–1933, is the first historical account of free verse as a race-based construction. Extant scholarship positions free verse as an American effort to revitalize a dying art in an era of simplistic, repetitive Victorian poetry. I show instead that the intellectual origins of free verse lie in attempts to allay fears about the future of white American identity. My research methods draw from historical poetics, a field of study that examines poetic forms, genres, and theories in their social and political contexts in order to better understand the historically specific cultural work poems have performed. My particular methodology in this project has been to scour the journals, literary magazines, and poetry anthologies of the time in order to demonstrate the influence of the newly institutionalized fields of ethnology and anthropology on the poetry and criticism of the late nineteenth century. Under this influence, critics and academics promoted free verse as an expression of the (white) American race they imagined was emerging in the New World. My research identifies the fundamental but, until now, neglected connections between prosodic theories of free verse and constructions of American whiteness, and shows how these discourses shaped popular and academic understandings of African-American and Native American poetry. The Secret History of Free Verse offers new readings of key American authors and publications, including Walt Whitman, James Weldon Johnson, and Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, and breaks new ground by reconceptualizing the role that poetry has played in circulating ideas about racial and national identity to a broad reading public.

I have also received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Massachusetts Historical Society for a planned second book, Everyday Laureates: Community Poetry in New England 1865-1900, which explores the reading practices of amateur poetry societies.