Harris Feinsod

Assistant Professor of English

University Hall Room 222
Telephone: (847) 467-1762
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail

 

Harris Feinsod (A.B., Brown, Ph.D., Stanford) teaches 20th and 21st century U.S. and Latin American literature and culture. His research focuses on comparative poetics and the history of poetry in English and Spanish, modernism and the historical avant-gardes in Europe and the Americas, transnational literary studies (especially the history of hemispheric literary and cultural relations), and the relation between postmodernism and the inter-ethnic cultures of the U.S. "new west." He is a former Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and he was a College Fellow at Northwestern in 2011-12 and a Mellon Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center in summer, 2012. His articles have appeared in Telos and in the 4th edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), for which he served as an assistant editor. He contributes occasionally to Arcade: Literature, Humanities and the World.

His current book project, Fluent Mundo: Inter-American Poetry, is a literary history of the relations between poets in the U.S. and Latin America in an era of cultural diplomacy, from the intensification of the Good Neighbor Policy at the onset of World War II through the cultural policy initiatives of the 1960s. Reading major poems and collections by Bishop, Cardenal, Carrera Andrade, Ginsberg, Hughes, Lezama Lima, Neruda, Olson, Stevens, Williams and many others, Fluent Mundo tracks interchanges between state-sponsored inter-Americanism, academic verse culture and avant-garde poetics. Recuperating a tradition of hemispheric literary journals, and revising prevalent views on the ethics of translation and dominant period styles, the book demonstrates how the evolving experience of hemispheric relations informed several generations of diverse mid-century poets in vanguard milieus and the halls of diplomatic officialdom.  

In 2012-13, he is organizing Northwestern's Comparative Modernisms workshop together with Rebecca Johnson, and he is the faculty coordinator for the "Futures of Poetics" working group sponsored by The Poetry & Poetics Colloquium.  

 

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