Current Research

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.

“Free Verse, Historical Poetics, and Settler Time.” Literature Compass, vol. 17, no. 7, July 2020.

Abstract: This article pushes back against the ongoing literary historical tendency to narrate the emergence of free verse forms in the modernist era as a salutary break with the poetic practices of the nineteenth century. Using the methods of historical poetics, I read key texts by the modernist poet and activist Mary Austin, who helped to invent Native American poetry as a field, to show that the concept of free verse was a tool of settler domination as much as it was a democratization of poetic language or a formal innovation. Austin framed free verse poetry as a technology for managing time—specifically, for integrating Native Americans into the relentlessly linear march of what Mark Rifkin has recently theorized as settler time. Austin’s theories of free verse had significant, distorting effects on the way Native American oral expressions were presented as poetry in modernist anthologies, which enacted a type of textual allotment. Remembering that debates about rhythm, meter, and poetic form were also debates about temporality, space, and identity fundamentally challenges our critical assumptions about the hierarchies of form and genre that implicitly structure our literary historical narratives.

“Constructing Walt Whitman: Literary History and the Histories of Rhythm,” Critical Rhythm, edited by Jonathan Culler and Ben Glaser, Fordham University Press, 2019, pp. 128–150.

Abstract: This essay argues that the figure of Walt Whitman the prosodic liberator has been so fully naturalized that that the complexities of Whitman’s canonization—and the contentious prosodic debates it involved—have been largely forgotten. I show that to claim that Whitman’s new form was free verse is to take for granted that we know what free verse was and is, and, in the process, to simplify a complex history of debates about poetic rhythm. Whitman’s poetry was not called “free verse” with any regularity until the 1920s, and even then, arguments about the nature of free verse abounded. American scholars in the 1910s and 20s hotly contested the formal identity of Whitman’s writing, turning to scientific studies of linguistic rhythm to solve the problem of free verse once and for all. Focusing primarily on the critical work of Fred Newton Scott, Amy Lowell, and Mary Austin, I show that these arguments about Whitman’s rhythm were motivated by concerns about constructing an American identity. As the second great wave of immigration increased the diversity of the American population and stimulated anxiety about the country’s ability to absorb multiple immigrant bodies into a coherent national body, debates about Whitman’s rhythms became debates about an imagined American race. In the process, these debates produced key ideas about the nature of free verse and modern poetry that continue to circulate in the academy today in deracinated, decontextualized forms. This significant moment in the country’s “absorption” of Whitman as a generative figure thus provides a particularly rich site for rethinking the relationship between poetic rhythms, national ideologies, and literary history.

“Counting with Crapsey,” Unsung Masters: Adelaide Crapsey, edited by Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, Pleiades Press, 2018, pp. 166–183.

Abstract: Since its posthumous publication in 1918, Adelaide Crapsey’s A Study in English Metrics has posed a challenge for critics, who tend to read this compact prosodic treatise as idiosyncratic and exceptional. But this critical focus on Crapsey’s exceptionalism does a disservice to her intense engagement with the huge body of prosodical discourse that saturated the cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to her role in modernist poetics. This essay thus takes on the modest but consequential goal of reorienting Crapsey scholarship away from the image of a woman theorizing new approaches to prosody in isolation toward the image of a scholar engaged in critical conversations, writing herself into discursive fields and helping to further debates about English prosody in productive and innovative—if not entirely unique—ways.

“Editing America: Nationalism and the New Poetry,” Modernism/modernity, vol. 21, no. 4, 2014, pp. 199–208.

Abstract: My account of the new poetry sheds new light on four widely circulated and pub- licized collections and studies that helped to shape its discourse: Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s The New Poetry: An Anthology (1917), Amy Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Louis Untermeyer’s Modern Ameri- can Poetry: An Introduction, and Untermeyer’s The New Era in American Poetry (1919). These works are particularly representative because of their broad reach and sustained engagement with contemporaneous ideas of cultural development as they were elaborated in academic and popular criticism. Monroe and Henderson’s anthology went through four printings in 1917 and continued to be printed in new runs through 1922 (a revised edition was issued in 1923 and was reprinted and updated through the 1930s). Untermeyer’s anthology was also issued in a second edition and remained in print throughout the 1930s (Newcomb, 21–22). Lowell’s book began as a series of well- attended lectures and sold well enough to be reprinted multiple times in the 1920s.12 As I will show, all of these texts, in distinct but related ways, constructed a fictional generic coherence for the new poetry based on the idea that it was an organic product of the American people. These critics abstracted social relations into verse traits, draw- ing on anthropological and ethnological discourses to argue that what made the new poetry new was its ability to organize communities around a shared set of national and racial concerns. Far from championing a modern version of cultural relativism, these anthologies supported romantic ideals of national growth.