Dr. Joseph Shafer

MA (Dartmouth College)
PhD (University of Warwick)

About:

Joseph Shafer teaches in the American, British, and Canadian Studies program. His research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry, critical theory, political economy, and aesthetics, particularly relations between a feminist, queer, and black aesthetic. Before joining the department, Joseph was faculty at Clemson University and was awarded fellowships by University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, the Government of Ireland’s Irish Research Council, and Auburn University. His essays and articles have appeared in edited collections and journals such as Oxford Literary Review, Textual Practice, Arizona Quarterly, PN Review, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Literary Theory, and International Yearbook of Hermeneutics. An interview with Jacques Rancière was published in SubStance.

His book, Appearing beside Text: Uprisings of In-difference in Post-1945 American Poetry, introduces how the negative space between print or text can appear as another type of textual material. Such transformations in perception, regarding bodies as repressed or excluded as typographical space, involve transitioning out of frameworks based on an absolute alterity epitomized by the page into an aesthetics where every material or body appears to play a conflicted part both inside and outside the work. Appearing beside Text traces this movement through theorists, but mainly through poetry and prose, novels and nonfiction, by poets as diverse as Claudia Rankine, Ronald Johnson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, H.D., Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Barbara Guest. Shafer has also edited Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest (2025), with a Foreword by Marjorie Welish, and has coedited a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest (2027) with Norma Cole, with an Introduction by Elizabeth Willis (both published by Wesleyan University Press). 

His current book projects include Toward a Blackness Divided: Diverging Supplementarities in Contemporary Black Poetics, and Architectures Apparitions: The Work of Barbara Guest. The first contrasts the poetics of certain black theorists/artists who explicitly disagree or differ over the requirements for producing blackness, itself already a divided form in varying ways; as in Fred Moten, David Marriott, Simone White, C. S. Giscombe, Claudia Rankine, the painter Stanley Whitney, among others. The second book examines the opposing architectural structures and dynamics in Guest’s plays, fiction, poetry, and essays; and how those constructions, and simultaneous destructions, create ghostly forms.

Selected publications:

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

“The Non/Existence of Fred Moten’s Blackness,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Black Literatures, edited by Raquel Kennon and Tolulope Akinwole. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

“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 VIII: Transference, edited by Gautam Basu Thakur and Jonathan Dickstein (Palgrave, 2020).

“Determining Art as Thrice Removed: Leveling Ben Lerner’s Tower of Representation,” in Ben Lerner, Edges of Genre: Poetry, Fiction, and Poetic Collaborations, edited by Yannicke Chupin and Karim Daanoune. (Routledge, 2026).

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

BA & MA courses offered:

Defining the Color Line

Visual Art in American Literature

Narratives of Anarchism

The Politics of Aesthetics

Contemporary Women's Poetry

Upsetting the Narrative: 1970s American Cinema

Modernist Fiction

Post-WWII British Poetry

Atlantic Migrations to & from the Carribean

The Poet's Novel

Changing America’s Frontier Economy

The Cultural Unconscious in American Studies

MA Writing for Research

Independent Projects in American Studies