Dr. Joseph Shafer

Joseph Shafer

Wiss. Mitarbeiter

Kontaktdaten

+49 6421 28-24762 joseph.shafer@ 1 Wilhelm-Röpke-Straße 6
35032 Marburg
W|02 Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute (Raum: 01D13 bzw. +1D13)
  • Education

    Master of Arts M.A. from Dartmouth College, NH, U.S.A

    Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from University of Warwick, U.K.

  • Biography

    Joseph Shafer teaches  in the American, British and Canadian Studies program. His research mostly focuses on modern and contemporary American poetry, transatlanticism, critical theory, political economy, and aesthetics, particularly nexuses between a feminist, queer and black aesthetic. Before joining the department, Joseph was faculty at Clemson University and was awarded postdoctoral fellowships by the Government of Ireland's Irish Research Council, Auburn University, and the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute. Recently published articles and chapters include pieces on Claudia Rankine, Stephen Jonas, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Sylvia Plath, Norma Cole, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Olson, Ben Lerner, D.H. Lawrence, Stéphane Mallarmé, and the painter Stanley Whitney. Other chapters have been published on the aesthetics of theoristst such as Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, and Fred Moton. His interview with Rancière was published in SubStance.

    Joseph edited and wrote the Introduction for Meditations: the Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, with a Foreword by Marjorie Welish and coedited, with Norma Cole, a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest with an Introduction by Elizabeth Willis (both published by Wesleyan University Press). His first monograph, Appearing beside Text: Uprisings of Indifference in Post-1945 American Poetry, explores how the negative space between text can appear as another type of textual material. Such transformations of perception involve transitioning out of frameworks based on an absolute alterity epitomized by the page, which is always outside of the textual work, into an aesthetics where each different thing appears inside and outside the work simultaneously. Appearing beside Text retraces these movements in poems and prose, novels and non-fiction, by poets as diverse as Charles Olson, Susan Howe, H.D., Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Barbara Guest, Louis Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson, and Claudia Rankine.

  • Current projects

    Joseph's current projects include distinguishing forms of supplementarity in contemporary black poetry/art, rearticulating Marx's relation to Kant, editing the plays of Barbara Guest, and accounting for D.H. Lawrence's formative influences across the postwar American queer and feminist poetry.

  • Selected publications

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

    - "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 (Lacan Series, Palgrave, 2020).

    -Appearing Beside Text: Uprisings of In-difference in Post-1945 American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry Series, Palgrave, 2025).

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

  • B.A. and M.A. courses offered

    The American Unconscious
    Defining the Color Line
    Frontier Economies
    Visual Art in American Literature
    Post-WWII English Poetry
    Literary Communities
    Narratives of Anarchism
    Atlantic Migrations
    Women's Poetry
    The Politics of Aesthetics
    Literary Movements
    The Poet's Novel
    Writing for Research for MA Students
    Independent Project

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