The Critical Poetics stream affords theoretically and textually informed ways of thinking about and within genres, articulating poetics as a method as much as object of inquiry. To this end, Critical Poetics includes but is not limited to the close study of poetics and poetry across periods, both Early (whether Medieval, Shakespearean, Early American) and Modern/Contemporary, extending to investigations of narrative/narrative theory, rhetoric, literary theory and other formalisms (including those engaged with affect theory and queer theory), critique and post-critique. Critical Poetics is committed to the imbrication of research and imagination; to the material conditions of making and knowing; to language difference (resisting the traps of monolingualism) and variation across expressive media, history, culture, and experience. As part of the experimental humanities, the Critical Poetics stream is drawn to animacies of thinking irreducible to discipline. 

Critical Poetics Faculty:

• Ann Christensen
• Sally Connolly
• Daniel Davies
• Sarah Ehlers
• Jamie Ferguson
• David Mikics
• Michael Snediker
• Lorraine Stock
• Roberto Tejada

Recent Faculty Books:

• Jamie Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2022)

• Michael Snediker, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

• Sarah Ehlers, Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

• Sally Connolly, Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets After Auden (University of Virginia Press, 2016)

Featured Courses:

• Premodern Poetics (Dr. Daniel Davies)

• Poetics of Attention (Dr. Michael Snediker)

• Archiving Poetics (Dr. Sarah Ehlers)