简介

I teach and write about 20th century poetry. Pursuing a particular interest in the relations between literature and the visual arts, I have been most concerned with how individual poets have used the visual arts to expand the expressive capacities of language and to address questions of form and content that have compelled them individually and collectively. I began my scholarly work with a focus on the early part of the 20th century. Yeats and the Visual Arts (Rutgers 1986; reissued Syracuse 2003), follows the varied engagements with the visual arts across the career of a single author. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (Cambridge 2008) explores the prevalence of ekphrasis—the poetic representation of a work of art—across the 20th-century among poets in England, Ireland and the US. I’ve been interested particularly in how ekphrasis opens the lyric into a social space, making it interactive, polyvocal and often public. My research and teaching interests also extend into textual studies, especially the semantics of the physical page and the uses of illustration. Before coming to BU in 2012, I taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, where my more than 25 years of classroom experience included overseas teaching in England, Ireland and Germany. I am currently detailed full-time to the provost’s office where I serve as the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs. Although I am not currently teaching, I am glad to talk with students interested in 20th-century poetry and to work with students pursing independent projects at the graduate or undergraduate level.