My research examines modern and contemporary poetry in relation to infrastructure, cultural policy, and nationalism.
Late Documentary Poetics
My in-progress monograph provides a literary historical account of the development of documentary poetry in Canada and the United States. This project connects modernist documentary poetics to technologies of liberal statecraft, like the New Deal in the US and the Massey Commission in Canada, and argues that contemporary—or “late”—documentary poets strategically adopt documentary forms to contest culture’s longstanding instrumentalization in the service of liberal governmentality. The monograph builds on my SSHRC-funded doctoral dissertation, which received a Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal in the Humanities. Peer-reviewed material from this project is forthcoming in ASAP Journal.
Infrastructural Poetics
My approach to the study of poetics is increasingly informed by critical infrastructure studies, an interdisciplinary method of analyzing organizational patterns first developed in media studies and anthropology. How do recent experiments with poetic form—from data-driven visualizations to interactive installations—propose alternative infrastructural arrangements and encourage collaborations between the arts, science, and engineering? I am currently co-editing a special issue of College Literature with Michael Martin Shea (University of Louisiana) on “Infrastructural Poetics” (forthcoming Spring 2026), which will be the first refereed publication to consider the intersection of poetics and critical infrastructure studies.
National Poetry Month: Arts Funding & its Nationalisms
My SSHRC-supported postdoctoral project turns to National Poetry Month to investigate the relationship between arts funding and shifting nationalist frameworks. Across the twentieth century, funding for the arts played a strategic role in the liberal state’s consolidation of national cultural identity at home and expansion of cultural diplomacy abroad. In our current nationalist era characterized by protectionism, hardening borders, and the erosion of multilateral institutions like UNESCO, what new pressures and expectations do writers and literary organizations face with respect to funding? As a transnational node that connects a wide range of small to mid-sized institutional agents, National Poetry Month provides a focused case study of the channels through which poets share their work and participate in the construction of national reading publics.