Education 

PhD, University of Virginia, 2007

Specialization 

• Twentieth and Twenty-first-Century American Literature
• Poetry and Poetics
• Aesthetic Theory
• Modernism and the Avant-Garde
• Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Recent Courses

• The Idea of the Aesthetic from Kant to Cottagecore
• Theories of The Lyric
• Vernacular Aesthetic Categories
• History of Theory and Criticism
• The Work of Art in the Age of Slop

Research Interests 

I am a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century literature, art, and culture. Most broadly, my research concerns how aesthetic experience shapes the way people understand the world and their place within it, particularly in relationship to gender and sexuality. 

My second book, Relatability: Sharing and Oversharing with the New York School Poets (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press), argues that relatability is the most important aesthetic category of our contemporary moment. Despite its association with selfies and social media, however, I offer a genealogy of the concept that traces its emergence in the work of the New York School Poets writing in the middle of the twentieth century. For several of these poets, writing in the years running up to and immediately following the Stonewall uprising and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement, a new understanding of aesthetic experience made it possible to imagine queer identities as something that could be shared via art rather than hidden by it. Offering extensive close readings of work by Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Joe Brainard, and Alice Notley, Relatability shows how lyric poetry offered writers in the twentieth century tools for thinking about the opportunities and pitfalls that attended the project of trying to relate. 

My first book, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford University Press, 2016), argues for a recalibrated understanding of the relation between sexuality and the aesthetic through a revaluation of modernist ekphrasis. From the well-wrought urns of the New Critics onward, ekphrasis has figured prominently in the legacy of modernist literary criticism, but a tendency to read its complicated modes of relationality in terms of either autonomy or antagonism has obscured the forms of creative failure and imitation embodied in the desire to confuse poetry for pottery. Attending to mimetic and descriptive strategies without dismissing the aspirations for wholeness and closure that often animate them allows for the recognition that queerness and modernism are intertwined in unexpected and unpredictable ways, revealing new insights into the varieties of abstraction, preterition, and spatial form that stand behind modernism's investment in the aesthetic.

My current research and teaching are particularly concerned with vernacular aesthetic categories such as oddly satisfying, mid, cringe, trad, and so on, and with what these categories can tell us both about our current historical moment and the history of aesthetic theory in general. I am also beginning work on a project tentatively entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Slop."

In addition to my scholarly writing, I have also co-founded, along with Kamran Javadizadeh and Johanna Winant, Re/Verse a new series of creative scholarly books treating specific books of poems published by Amherst College Press.

Selected Publications 

BOOKS
  

• Relatability: Sharing and Oversharing with the New York School Poets (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
• The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford University Press, 2016).

ESSAYS

• “Reading With,” The Barbara Johnson Collective, edited by Devin Garofalo and Nathan Hensley (Northwestern University Press: forthcoming 2026).
• “Vibe Theory,” Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant (Princeton University Press, 2025).
• “Funny Emotions: Queer Theory, Affect, and Poetry,” The Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism, edited by Melanie Micir (Routledge, 2025).
• “The New York School’s Queer Happiness,” The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, edited by Benjamin Kahan (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
• “Lyric Wilt, or the Here and Now of Queer Potentiality,” New Literature History3 (2020).
• “Having a Coke with You Is Even More Fun than Ideology Critique,” PMLA 5 (2019).
• “The Friendly Way,” in Joe Brainard’s Art, edited by Yasmine Shamma (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
• “Friending Joe Brainard,” Criticism 3 (Summer 2018).
• “The Turing Test and Other Love Songs,” The Year’s Work in Nerd Studies, edited by Jonathan Eburne and Benjamin Schreier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).
• “Modernity and Other Nocturnal Distempers,” Modernism/Modernity Print-Plus Platform, November 2016, https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/modernity-and-other-nocturnaldistempers.
• “Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis and the Spatial Form of ” PMLA 124.3 (May 2009).
• “Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots: Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet,” American Literature  79.4 (December 2007).

Reference Articles and Reviews  

• Review of Virginia Jackson, Before Modernism, American Literary History (November 2024).
• “Beside Reparative Reading,” Review of Tyler Bradway, Queer Experimental Literature, Postmodern Culture (2019).
• “TMI: Confession and Performance,” Review of Christopher Grobe, The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV, Los Angeles Review of Books (March 16, 2019).
• “Poetry and the Ecology of Attention.” Review of Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature (2018).
• Review of Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, in Modern Philology2 (2017).
• Entries on “spatial form” and “image,” The Princeton Encyclopedia or Poetry and Poetics, 4^rd (2012).  
• “Leo Bersani and the Universe.” “Honoring Eve,” special issue devoted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Criticism2 (2010): 317-24.
• Review of recent books on Djuna Barnes, The Space Between1 (2010).
• “Reading Late Ashbery.” Criticism: 3 (Summer 2009).
• Entry on John Koethe. Encyclopedia of the New York School, ed. Terrence Diggory (2009).

Interviews, Podcasts, Etc.

• “Having a Coke with You,” Kamran Javadizadeh, Close Readings Podcast, December 12, 2022.
• Interview with Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma for The Network for New York School Studies, February 1, 2022: https://www.nnyss.org/media.html
• “Both Attaching to Texts and Inventing Them,” Interview with Andy Fitch, Los Angeles Review of Books: February 23, 2018: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/attaching-texts-inventingtalking-brian-glavey/

Editorial

• Founding co-editor of Re/Verse, Amherst College Press, https://acpress.amherst.edu/series/

Recent Presentations

• “Funny Emotions,” The Stories We Tell: Rethinking the Disciplinary Past Symposium. Louisiana State University, April 25, 2025.
• “Some Theses on the Concept of Relatability,” Morrison Lecture, University of South Carolina, March 20, 2025.
• Reading with Helen Vendler Roundtable, Modern Language Association Conference. New Orleans, LA. January 2025.
• Poetry as an Object of Literary Study Roundtable, Modern Language Association Conference. New Orleans, LA. January 2025.
• “The Relatability of the Closet,” Modernist Studies Association Conference, Chicago, IL. November 204.
• “Cat Persons and Things,” Cohabiting Fictions Symposium, University of Texas, Austin, TX April 2024.
• “Relatable Aesthetics,” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Montreal, March 2024.
• “John Ashbery’s Studly Pose,” Modern Language Association Conference. Philadelphia, PA. January 2024.
• “Relatability,” Modern Language Association Conference. Philadelphia, PA. January 2024.
• “A Strange Sense of The Word Good,” Modernist Studies Association Conference. Brooklyn, NY. October 2023.
• “Wrong Answers Only,” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Chicago IL. March 2023.
• “Frank O’Hara at the Wedding,” Modernist Studies Association Conference. Portland, OR. October 2022.
• “Vibe Theory,” invited lecture, University of Michigan Poetry and Poetics Workgroup. December 7, 2021
• “Cruel Optimism and the Lyric Present,” Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference, October 2021.