Join the Department of English in welcoming our Bain Swiggett Distinguished Visitor in Poetry & Poetics, Virginia Jackson, on March 25th at 4:30pm.

Professor Jackson will discuss a pre-circulated section of Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric in the Nineteenth Century.

Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair of Rhetoric and Critical Theory in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), which won the Christian Gauss Prize and the MLA Prize for a First Book. She is the editor of On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute (ACLS E-Book, 2010; Meredith McGill, series editor) and, with Yopie Prins, the co-editor of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014). Her next book, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric in the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming from Princeton UP. Her essays in historical poetics have appeared in PMLA, New Literary History, MLQ, Victorian Poetry, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is one of the founding members of the Historical Poetics working group https://www.historicalpoetics.com