I teach poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, at Princeton University. I have written three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), Senses of Style (Chicago 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet 2017), as well as shorter books and essays on a variety of subjects, including Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s reading, Fairfield Porter, and player pianos. My poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in two volumes, Speculative Music (Sarabande 2013) and *A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings 2022). I am also an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) and acting chair of the English Department in 2018-19 and again in 2022-23.
My recent undergraduate classes include “Poetry and the Arts,” the Humanities Sequence, lectures on Shakespeare and on early English literature, and seminars on the poetry of Edmund Spenser, the theory and praxis of the human voice, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, and (at East Jersey State Prison, with Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative) poetry and belief. I have taught graduate classes on Shakespeare’s language, sixteenth-century lyric, and Renaissance romance, as well as less categorizable, co-taught seminars including Critique and Its Discontents, Style and Rule, Experience, The Poetics of History, and New Schools.
Ongoing collaborative, para-academic pedagogical projects include Schema for a School, the Attention Lab at Mildred’s Lane, and the Strother School of Radical Attention. That work, and related experiments in the structures and protocols of intellectual exchange and artistic experience, is gathered here under occasions. Work in progress includes an edited volume on the virtual sentence; a short, co-written book (with Josh Kotin) on J. H. Prynne’s Parkland; and a larger project to do with sound and simultaneity, with the tentative title All Together Now. The pages here on undergraduate and graduate teaching are under construction, a leave-year project of gathering in one place resources I have used to teach reading and writing in many different contexts.