Dr. Joseph Shafer

MA (Dartmouth College)
PhD (University of Warwick)

About:

Joseph Shafer teaches in the American, British, and Canadian Studies program. His research mostly focuses on modern and contemporary American poetry, transatlanticism, critical theory, political economy, and aesthetics, particularly nexuses between a feminist, queer, and black aesthetic. Before joining the department, Joseph was faculty at Clemson University and was awarded postdoctoral fellowships by the Government of Ireland’s Irish Research Council, Auburn University, and the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute. Recently published articles and chapters include pieces on Claudia Rankine, Stephen Jonas, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Sylvia Plath, Norma Cole, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Olson, Ben Lerner, D.H. Lawrence, Stéphane Mallarmé, and the painter Stanley Whitney. Other chapters have been published on the aesthetics of theorists Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, and Fred Moten. His interview with Rancière was published in SubStance. 

He edited and wrote the Introduction for Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, with a Foreword by Marjorie Welish, and he coedited, with Norma Cole, a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest with an Introduction by Elizabeth Willis (both published with Wesleyan University Press). His monograph, Appearing beside Text: Uprisings of In-difference in Post-1945 American Poetry, explores how the negative space between text can appear as another type of textual material. Such transformations involve transitioning out of frameworks based on an absolute alterity epitomized by the page into an aesthetics where each different thing appears inside and outside the work simultaneously. Appearing beside Text retraces these movements in poems and prose, novels and nonfiction, by poets as diverse as Charles Olson, Susan Howe, H.D., Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Barbara Guest, Louis Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson, and Claudia Rankine.

Current projects include distinguishing forms of supplementarity in contemporary black poetry/art, rearticulating Marx’s relation to Kant, editing the plays of Barbara Guest, and accounting for D.H. Lawrence’s influences across postwar American queer and feminist poetry.

Selected publications:

“Symbolic Economies between a Black Mirror and Black Aesthetic,” Journal of American Studies, 54, 2020.

“Twisting Modernism around Mallarmé’s White Hair: Badiou versus Rancière,” in Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism, edited by Arka Chattopadhyay and Arthur Rose (Bloomsbury, 2024).

"Art Movements behind Nine Drawings: The Early Years, 1945-1984", in That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making, edited by Dale Martin Smith (University of New Mexico Press, 2025).

"Killing the Soul with Zucchi's Painting," in Reading Lacan's Seminar VIIII: Transference, edited by Gautam Basu Thakur and Jonathan Dickstein (Lacan Series, Palgrave, 2020).

Appearing Beside Text: Uprisings of In-difference in Post-1945 American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry Series, Palgrave, 2025).

"Introduction," in Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, editor (Wesleyan University Press, 2025).

BA & MA courses offered:

The American Unconscious

Defining the Color Line

Frontier Economies

Visual Art in American Literature 

Post-WWII English Poetry 

Literary Communities

Narratives of Anarchism

Atlantic Migrations

Women's Poetry 

The Politics of Aesthetics

Literary Movements 

The Poet's Novel

Writing for Research for MA Students

Independent Project