Joshua Kotin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. His research and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, global modernism, and US literature after 1820. He received his BA from McGill University and his PhD from the University of Chicago.

Kotin is the author of Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2018) and, with Jeff Dolven, The Parkland Mysteries (The Last Books, 2023). He is also the director and co-founder of the Shakespeare and Company Project (2014–present).

Currently, he is working on three projects:

• A Revolutionary Year focuses on Amiri Baraka’s life and work in 1965, the year he co-founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Research for the book has been published in Critical Inquiry (“Poems That Kill”), American Literary History (“Funding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School”), and Post45 (“A Friend, an Enemy”).
   
• Rejection Letters examines negative judgments of value, and presents a new history of US literature based on archives of rejected manuscripts. Research for the book has appeared in American Literary History (“Archives of Rejection”).
   
• Shakespeare and Company’s Readers tells the story of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris through the lives of its patrons: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Dolly Wilde, Walter Benjamin, and Aimé Césaire, among others. The book is based on the Shakespeare and Company Project and its published datasets. “The World of Shakespeare and Company,” a special issue about the Project, was recently published by the Journal of Cultural Analytics and Modernism/modernity.

Kotin has also published essays and reviews on—and interviews with—other twentieth and twenty-first-century writers: John Ashbery, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Peter Gizzi, Ernest Hemingway, Devin Johnston, Hugh Kenner, Phillip Lamantia, J.H. Prynne, Stephen Rodefer, Ed Sanders, James Schuyler (forthcoming), Keston Sutherland, Genya Turovskaya, Helen Vendler, and Anne Waldman.

In addition to “The World of Shakespeare and Company” (co-edited with Rebecca Sutton Koeser), Kotin has co-edited special issues of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies on digital archives and avant-garde periodicals and Post45 on contemporary literature and culture, How to Be Now. From 2005 to 2008, he was Editor of Chicago Review.

Recent undergraduate courses include “Language to Be Looked At” (co-taught with Irene Small), “Contemporary Poetry,” “James Joyce’s Ulysses,” and “Melville and His Readers.” Recent graduate courses include “1922,” “Paris, Modern” (co-taught with Effie Rentzou), “Postwar New York,” and “The Avant-Garde.” At Princeton, he is an affiliated or associated faculty member in the Program of European Cultural Studies; the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and the University Center for Human Values. He also works with Special Collections at Princeton’s Firestone Library to develop collections of little magazines and concrete and visual poetry.