Joshua Kotin
Joshua Kotin is an associate professor in the Department of English. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES); and an associated faculty member at the University Center for Human Values (UCHV). His research and teaching focus on global modernism, poetry and poetics, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contemporary poetry, and literary theory. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in 2011. From 2005 to 2008, he was editor of Chicago Review.
Kotin’s first book, Utopias of One, will be published by Princeton University Press in December 2017. The book examines the relation between writing and personal autonomy, and includes chapters on Henry David Thoreau, W.E.B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, J.H. Prynne, and Emily Dickinson. Kotin is currently working on a second book, Coteries and Manifestos, about the formation and dissolution of communities of avant-garde artists and writers from the midnineteenth century to the present. His essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, The Wallace Stevens Journal, nonsite.org, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
In addition to his critical writing, Kotin directs a digital humanities project, “Mapping Expatriate Paris: The Shakespeare and Company Lending Library Project” (MEP). He is also working with Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton’s Firestone Library to develop a collection of visual and concrete poetry, and postwar little magazines.
[Updated 4/18/17]
Book
Utopias of One, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Essays
[with Michael Kindellan]. “The Cantos and Pedagogy.” Modernist Cultures 12.3 (November 2017), forthcoming, with critical responses from Charles Altieri, Michael Coyle and Steven Yao, Alan Golding, and Marjorie Perloff.
“Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam and Soviet Utopianism.” Modernism/modernity 24.1 (2017): 161–183.
“Stevens v. Frost.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 41.1 (2017): 81–89.
“On Reading and Rereading Contemporary Poetry.” Chicago Review 60:2 (2016): 194–199.
[with Sarah Chihaya and Kinohi Nishikawa]. “‘The Contemporary’ by the Numbers.” Post45: Contemporaries (2016).
“Wallace Stevens’s Point of View.” PMLA 130.1 (January 2015): 54–68.
“The Archives of A. Walton Litz.” Make It New: The Ezra Pound Society Magazine 1.3 (2014): 55–58.
“Helen Vendler’s On Extended Wings Today.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 38.2 (Fall 2014): 153–157.
“Blood-Stained Battle-Flags: Ezra Pound, J.H. Prynne, and Classical Chinese Poetry.” News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Contemporary British Poetry, ed. Richard Parker. Bristol: Shearsman, 2014, 133–141.
“Philip Lamantia’s Practical Politics.” Colloquium 1 (2012).
“The Anti-Review.” Afterword to A Question Mark Above the Sun, Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara, by Kent Johnson. Buffalo: Starcherone Books, 2012, 249–257.
Interviews
[with Jeff Dolven]. “The Art of Poetry No. 101: J.H. Prynne.” Paris Review 218 (Fall 2016): 174–207.
[with Michael Kindellan and V. Joshua Adams]. “An Interview with Stephen Rodefer.” Chicago Review 54.3 (Winter 2009): 8–28.
Reviews
Review of Wallace Stevens Among Others: Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture, by David R. Jarraway (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) ESC: English Studies in Canada 42.3 (2016), forthcoming.
Review of Concepts and Conception in Poetry, by J.H. Prynne (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2014). The Wallace Stevens Journal 39.1 (Spring 2015): 128–130.
Review of In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011, by Peter Gizzi (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2014). Chicago Review 58:3/4 (Fall 2014): 336–340.
Review of Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, ed. Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout (New York: Routledge, 2012). Modernism/modernity, 21.1 (January 2014): 381–383.
“The Authentic Hemingway.” Review of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 2: 1923–1925, ed. Sandra Spanier et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Los Angeles Review of Books (January 1, 2014).
Review of Writing against Time, by Michael Clune (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). nonsite.org 10 (September 2013).