Poetry and poetics
Group members
Tamsin Badcoe
Tamsin has research interests in the intersection of poetic and devotional forms with early modern spatial and textual practices including those of cosmography, chorography, geography, and navigation; the literary representation of early modern environments, specifically coastlines, wetlands, and islands, and the ship at sea; the popularity of poetry in print during the early modern period.
Andrew Bennett
Andrew Bennett has published widely on Romantic-period and 20th-century poetry and poetics. Topics include literary ignorance; literature and suicide; and literary posterity. His current book-length project is a detailed study of Keats’s letters with the working title John Keats and the Poetics of Letter Writing.
Kelsi Delaney
Kelsi's research considers topics including form in contemporary Caribbean poetry, Caribbean and black British spoken word traditions and the (de)colonial history of the sonnet in the Anglophone Caribbean. She is also part of a collaborative project working on gender-based violence in the Caribbean. In this capacity she researches representations of GBV in poetry and spoken word, as well the use of arts-based methodologies in GBV research and activism.
Carrie Etter
Carrie is a poet whose research into poetry and poetics focuses on contemporary Anglophone poetries with particular interest in its intersections with literary trauma theory, environmental crises, and hybridity.
Natalie Ferris
Natalie’s research forges new connections between the history and practice of data science, theories of gender, and the creative arts. In her recent book, Abstraction in Post-War British Literature (2022) and in forthcoming projects, she thinks about the ways in which aesthetic, philosophical and technological advancements throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have initiated new forms of literary and artistic expression and experimentation, particularly in the hands of women, and she thinks about this in tandem with the extent to which modern institutions, networks, and ideologies have shaped literary and visual perception.
Stephen James
Stephen’s main research interests are in 20th and 21st-century poetry, including Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and Stevie Smith. He has published multiple articles on each of these writers and a monograph on Lowell, Hill and Heaney. He is currently working on two monographs on Hill.
Noreen Masud
Noreen works on early- to mid-20th century literature, with a focus on Stevie Smith, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
Rowena works on women’s writing and gender studies across the 20th and 21st-Centuries, with particular interest in feminist and experimental poetry and poetics. She is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2022), as well as two editions of Rukeyser's writing: Savage Coast (Feminist Press, 2013) and The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell UP, 2023). Rowena is writing the first biography of Rukeyser for Bloomsbury USA, for which she received a 2022-23 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Fellowship.
William is a poet and critic. He has published on many modern and contemporary poets, including Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter and is currently working on the psychology of verse form.
Jane Wright
Jane publishes on Victorian poetry and the stylistic features of nineteenth-century prose. Authors of particular interest include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. Jane is the editor of volume 4 of The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson (for OUP) and is currently editing a volume of essays on poetical allusion. She is writing a book with the working title Poetical Bees in Victorian Poetry.