Kamran Javadizadeh is an associate professor of English at Villanova University, where he works on the history of poetry and poetics, with a particular emphasis on the poetry of the 20th and 21st century United States. How does poetry emerge out of modern life, out of social relations, out of institutional arrangements? What forms of life — what forms of thinking, of feeling, of belonging — does poetry make possible? These are the major questions his work addresses.

His first book, Institutionalized Lyric (forthcoming, Oxford UP), offers a new account of mid-century U.S. poetry, one that sees the increasingly institutional positioning of poetry, its sponsorship by universities and offices of state, and the sudden prominence, in the lives of poets and as a subject for poetry, of the experiences of breakdown and psychiatric institutionalization as two sides of the same coin. His book argues that the period’s autobiographical lyric bears the marks of its paradoxically doubled institutional provenance: mid-century poets learned how to write autobiographically, Javadizadeh argues, not by breaking free of impersonal institutions but instead by absorbing the lessons those institutions had delivered so as to make their own lives ramify as objects of institutional scrutiny. 

Javadizadeh's essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Point, PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, The Yale Review, and in several edited anthologies. His essay on Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the whiteness of lyric received the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize, given annually to an “outstanding article” published in PMLA. His research has been supported by fellowships at the Beinecke Library and the Harry Ransom Center. With Robert Volpicelli, he is co-editor of “Poetry Networks,” a special issue of the journal College Literature. He has also begun to write a book on poetry and the Iranian diaspora. Tentatively titled “The Relational Past,” this project braids together literary criticism, family memoir, and translation in order to explore the capacity of poetry to stage imperfect, often contrafactual, forms of being together for people whom history and politics have riven apart.