Eric Keenaghan
Associate Professor
Affiliate Faculty with Women’s Studies
Ph.D. Temple University
Poetry Studies, Modernist Studies of the Americas, Political Theory, Queer and Gender Theory
Humanities 343
442-4088
To date, Eric Keenaghan has focused his research and literary theory on the queer redefinition of politics, individualism, and eroticism in modernist and cold war poetries
of the United States, Cuba, and Spain. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (The Ohio State University Press, 2009), as well as many articles and book reviews that have appeared in such journals as: modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, Contemporary Literature, The Translator, Translation Studies, Wallace Stevens Journal, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and postmodern culture. He is also a contributing author to several critical collections, including: Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); Queer Exoticism (Cambridge Scholars, forthcoming); and The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (Minnesota, forthcoming). His original poetry has appeared in various little magazines and e-zines such as Eoagh, Tool: A Magazine, Io Donna (Italy), The Ixnay Reader, and The Portable Boog Reader.
Currently, Keenaghan is working on a new book of poetry (Love Letters to My Husband). In addition, he is developing a new critical project, tentatively titled Life, Love, and War: Anarchism and American Poetry in the Twentieth Century. The latter book project examines how several American poets and poet-activists between the First World War and Vietnam—Lola Ridge, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, Muriel Rukeyser, and Martha Shelley—became disillusioned with the Old Left and, for the poets who lived beyond World War II, the emergent New Left. Their experimentations with form and subject matter, in now often-forgotten texts, tested the boundaries between the political and the poetic. Thus, they invaluably contributed to a shifting language and way of thinking about individualism and collectivism. Keenaghan develops a theory of ethical and politicized poetic engagement by reading their work through the chief concepts of “life,” “love,” and “war,” as those concepts are elaborated by the poets and idiosyncratic American “anarchistic” thought and practice.
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Select Graduate Courses
Reading American Poetry through Writing, the Unconscious, and Power (English 500: Spring 2009)
Modernism and Pragmatism: Reimagining Democracy, the Subject, the Nation (English 641: Spring 2008)
The Anti-Humanities? (English 720: Spring 2007)
Modernist Lyric and Theories of the Subject (English 580: Spring 2006)
Select Undergraduate Courses
In or About 1969: Reading Stonewall through New Left Radicalism (English/Women’s Studies 416Y: Fall 2009)
The Art of War: The American State and Aesthetic Politics in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Honors English 226: Fall 2009)
Anarchy in the U.S.A. (English 413Y: Spring 2009)
Writing in the Margins: Minority Writers on Writing (English 305Z: Fall 2008)
Cold War Lyric, 1950 - 1975 (English 358: Fall 2008)
Modernism, 1914 - 1945 (English 358: Spring 2008)
Queer Nationalism, Cold War – Present (English/Women’s Studies 416: Fall 2007)
Literature, Truth, and Freedom (English 310: Spring 2007, Fall 2007)
Queer in Theory, Queer in Practice (English/Women’s Studies 416: Fall 2005)
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