Breath Poetics

Timothy Anderson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He is writing a history of English-language alliteration in the long nineteenth century. This will reveal, by examining poetry’s cultural contexts, how alliteration served to protest as well as preserve social norms. Anderson’s articles on Richard Wagner’s anglophone reception appear in the journals Textual Practice and MLQ, and a monograph adapted from his 2022 PhD thesis is currently under review.

Mae Losasso is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she works on modern and contemporary poetics. She is the author of Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her current project, Breathturn, examines modes of breathlessness in late modernist poetics.

Britton Edelen is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University, where he focuses on Modernist literatures in English, French, and German. His dissertation project, “Language Worked Over: Modernism and the Poetics of Exhaustion,” explores exhaustion as an aesthetic figure and principle and in the wake of the thermodynamic revolution.

Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025), a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System, 2019) and several chapbooks, including pedagogies of the planthroposcene (above/ground press, forthcoming) and looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023). She co-edited the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. She teaches at Kenyon College.

Matthew Wilson Smith's interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).

Sam Carter is a lecturer at Dartmouth College. His work, which focuses on sound across Latin America, has appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, and Sounding Out!, among other publications. He is currently completing a manuscript titled The Auditors of Argentina: Texts, Technologies, and Tone.

Jordan Krohn is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities department at York University in Toronto, Ontario. His doctoral project works across Black Studies, Deaf Studies, and Sound Studies to listen to the sounds of Black cultural production during the U.S. Great Migration (1910-1970). His research applies a Deaf gain socio-cultural paradigm to amplify texts and multi-modal experiences away from audism.

Marlo Starr is an assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster. She holds a PhD in English from Emory University and an MFA in Poetry from Johns Hopkins University. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and she is the recipient of a 2024 Individual Excellence Award in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. She edits The Dodge, a magazine of environmental literature, translation, and writing about animals.

Sriya Chakraborty is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University. Her work primarily focuses on post-1900 British and American Literature, with a special emphasis on post-war, transatlantic experimental poetry and art.

Anne Marie (Annie) Thompson received her PhD from the University of Virginia and is currently a teaching fellow at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. Her work on Susan Howe has appeared in PMLA.

Sarah Nooter is the Edward Olson Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (2012), The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus, and Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality. She is co-editor of Sound and the Ancient Senses (2018) and of Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical (2023). Her newest book is How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (2024).