Our People

Juliana M. Spahr

Professor of English
Unit Chair of Arts and Writing
Frederick A. Rice Endowed Professor

Professional Interests

Poetry and poetics, cultural studies, anti-colonial literature and theory, social movements and literature, Marxism, contemporary literature

Bio

Juliana Spahr is a poet and scholar. Her poetry is indebted both to lyric traditions and to the more exploratory forms that are often called avant-garde or experimental. It is also ecologically attentive and internationalist in focus. Her scholarship explores the ambiguous and disconcerting role that literature plays in upholding the modern nation-state. Much of her research is collaborative and increasingly draws from the methodologies of computational sociology. Currently, she is at work on a co-written study that looks at how literature has been instrumentalized by philanthropy to suppress social movements. Other areas of focus include poetry and poetics, anti-colonial literature and theory, ecology, and Marxism. She has been a recipient of the O. B. Hardison Prize and fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her work has been translated into Greek, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Danish, Italian, Finnish, and Spanish.