Joseph Shafer

Education

PhD, University of Warwick, English and Comparative Literary Studies

MA, Dartmouth College

About Me

Joseph Shafer is a lecturer in the Department of English. While at Auburn University, he has also held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with the Government of Ireland's Irish Research Council and was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute. His research areas include post-1945 American poetry, 20th-century American literature, transatlanticism, critical theory, and aesthetics, particularly intersections between a feminist, queer, or black aesthetic.
His publications have been on a range of poets, from Mallarmé, H.D., D.H. Lawrence, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Steve Jonas, Fred Moten, to Sylvia Plath, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine, and Barbara Guest. Articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, Oxford Literary Review, PN Review, Études Lawrenciennes, and International Yearbook for Hermeneutics, while other essays on aesthetics and poetry have been published in collections Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII: On Transference (Palgrave's Lacan Series), Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury), and That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making (forthcoming). A conversation between Rancière and Shafer was also published in SubStance. He is currently editing a collection of Barbara Guest's prose, Meditations: A Barbara Guest Miscellany, with a preface from Marjorie Welish (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming) and, with Norma Cole, he is coediting a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest for Wesleyan, with an introduction by Elizabeth Willis.