Graduate Students
Veronica Alfano entered the English graduate program in 2005. She studies Victorian poetry, and is especially interested in the lyric and its various links to physical and cultural memory. Her dissertation will focus on Tennyson, Morris, Christina Rossetti, Symons, and Housman (with, perhaps, some Hardy and Hopkins for good measure). She does occasionally write poetry, but doesn’t think that the Internet is quite ready for it.
William Evans is a graduate student in the Department of English. His interests include sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature and culture, poetry and poetics, aesthetics, listening and music, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of criticism and theory.
Matthew Harrison writes one poem a year, to keep his union card. The rest of the time, he studies Elizabethan lyric and drama, with occasional detours into the rest of literature.
Aaron K. Hostetter: I work on the narrative poetry of the Middle Ages (Late Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, with some Old French thrown in for good measure), and am focusing on food and cooking in Medieval English Romance.
I’m also creating a verse translation of the major Anglo-Saxon poems after Beowulf, which can be found at http://anglosaxonpoetry.blogspot.com — this will be the first collection of its kind since the turn of the century! (But it will take time–I’m only 400 lines into Andreas!)
Evan Kindley is a third-year graduate student in the English Department at Princeton and a co-organizer of the Contemporary Poetry Colloquium. His special interests include British and American Modernism, the influence of French poetry and critical theory on English-language writing, the New York School of Poets (especially John Ashbery), and the influence of literary institutions and social networks on aesthetics and poetic practice. He is currently writing a thesis on the development of the role of the poet-critic in the 1930s. He has a blog about poetry, among other things, at http://letsreadandfindout.blogspot.com.
Greg Londe: I work primarily in late-19th, 20th and 21st century Anglophone poetry and poetics, with a particular focus on American and Irish literature. Areas of interest include documentary poetics; questions of race and voice; collaboration and group formations; genre theory (esp. the fates of epic and elegy in the 20th century); colonial and postcolonial studies; comix and graphic novels; and critical theory. I blog on literature, pop music and culture with my esteemed colleagues Evan Kindley and Adrienne Brown at http://letsreadandfindout.blogspot.com.
Ivan Ortiz joined the English Department in 2007 and hails from California. He has had a long love affair with poetry that stretches all the way back to Dr. Seuss’ “Oh the Places You’ll Go”. His graduate work will be focused in the poetry and poetics of the late 18th century and early 19th century, especially the Romantic poets. He is particularly interested in exploring the influence of natural philosophy on Romantic poetics and thought, the lyric, and aesthetics. Some of the poets he turns to when he has a free moment include Blake, Shelley, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop and Denise Levertov, but he is hoping to fall in love with many more. He writes poetry, usually at an hour of the night too absurd to reveal. When he composes one under reasonable conditions, he will very gladly share it.
Sonya Posmentier: I read and write about twentieth-century Anglophone poetry, especially African-American and Caribbean poetry. Some related interests are modernism, postcolonial poetry, poetic form, and lyric theory. My own poems have been published in Seneca Review, Lyric Review, Perihelion, and Konundrum. I’m working on a collection set in India during and after partition. I’m also the graduate assistant for the Poetry@Princeton website.
Ethel Rackin: I work on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and American poetry and poetics. My current research is on poetic ornamentation, focusing on questions of baroque and minimalist tendencies of the period spanning from the 1890’s until World War II. Related areas of interest include material culture; visual culture; fashion theory; and questions of gender. My own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry East, and elsewhere.
Ethel’s poetry links:
