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

He is the author of Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2018) and, with Jeff Dolven, The Parkland Mysteries (The Last Books, 2023). He’s also the director of the digital humanities initiative, Shakespeare and Company Project (2014–present), and co-author of the Shakespeare and Company Project Datasets (2020–2025).

Kotin is currently completing Poems That Kill, a book about art and politics that focuses on Amiri Baraka’s life and work in 1965, the year he 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”).

He is also working on two other book projects. The Art of Rejection analyzes 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, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, and Aimé Césaire, among others. 

Kotin has also written about 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, Keston Sutherland, Genya Turovskaya, Helen Vendler, and Anne Waldman. He has co-edited special issues of the Journal of Cultural Analytics and Modernism/modernity; the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies; and Post45. From 2005 to 2008, he was Editor of Chicago Review.

Recent undergraduate courses include “Language to Be Looked At,” “Contemporary Poetry,” “James Joyce’s Ulysses,” and “Melville and His Readers.” Recent graduate courses include “1922,” “Paris, Modern,” “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 to develop collections of little magazines and concrete and visual poetry.