Eric Keenaghan

Eric Keenaghan focuses his research on the political and ethical dimensions of modernist and cold war poetries, particularly in work by LGBTQ+-identified writers. He also has published and forthcoming work on teaching poetry, canonical high modernism, translation, and 20th- and 21st-century women's experimental poetry and fiction. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Ohio State University Press, 2009), coeditor of The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell University Press, 2023), and an advisory editor for the Journal of Modern Literature. He is a contributing author to many edited critical volumes, including The Beats: A Teaching Companion (Clemson University Press, 2021), The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry (Clemson University Press, 2021), and Thinking with the Poem: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of New Mexico Press, 2024). His articles have appeared in PMLA, Journal of Narrative Theory, Textual Practice, Translation Studies, Modernism/Modernity, and elsewhere.

Currently, he is at work on several projects, including in-progress book projects and essays on gay and lesbian liberation-era poetry and activism, American anarchist poetry and pacifist activism, and Muriel Rukeyser and queer feminist modernism’s antifascist legacy.

Professor Keenaghan teaches graduate and undergraduate courses about modernist poetry, cold war and contemporary poetry, literature of the Left and new social movements, queer and gender studies, political philosophy, and literary theory.
 

Books

The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose by Muriel Rukeyser (Cornell University Press, 2024; coedited with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein)

Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Ohio State University Press, 2009)

For a full list of publications, see curriculum vita (linked above) or personal website (linked below).
 

Teaching

Select courses
Graduate: Liberation’s Love Language: LGBTQ+ American Poetry and Activism; Muriel Rukeyser and Political Radicalism; Personal Politics and Impersonal Poetics; American Lyric Refigured; Modern Imagination and the Poetics of Possibility; The William Carlos Williams Era; American Modernist Poetry

Undergraduate: Introduction to LGBTQ+ American Literature (Honors College); Modernist American Poetry, 1900-1950; Cold War Poetry: The Beats and the Black Mountain School; Creating Publics [on US public intellectuals] (English Honors); How Sex Tells, How Sex Sells; Queer American Poetry and Politics; The Art of War (Honors College)
 

Links 

 Eric Keenaghan, Opening the Field (personal website)
 Eric Keenaghan, “How to Be Antifascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry” (radio interview and podcast recorded for Interchange, hosted by Doug Storm and broadcast on WFHB)
 Eric Keenaghan, "Openings: Some Notes on the Political in 'Drafts'" (a lyric essay on Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Drafts, published in Jacket2)
 Eric Keenaghan, from Love Letters to My Husband (original poems, published in Barzakh)
 Eric Keenaghan, A radio interview on Ralph Waldo Emerson and commonality (recorded for Against the Grain, hosted by C.S. Soong and broadcast on KPFA and WBAI)

 Social Media
 Twitter: @eric_keenaghan
 Instagram: erickeenaghan