Professor Peter Howarth, BA (Oxon) PhD (Cambridge), BA Contextual Theology (Durham)

Profile

I came to Queen Mary in 2007, after lecturing at the University of Nottingham (2000-2007) and completing a PhD at Cambridge in 2000. My first book, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (CUP, 2006) explored the poetics of non-modernism in the twentieth century, and my teaching and writing have continued to explore the politics, psychology and sociology of form ever since. As well as The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), this has led me to publish work on sonnets, the ways English is taught, and, more recently, on contemporary festivals (https://www.festivalasform.org). My new book, The Poetry Circuit (OUP, 2024) explores how reading in person became part of the job for twentieth century poets and what happened when they put poems into the circuit between artist, venue, audience and occasion.

Teaching

In 2012 I was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for leading innovative teaching on the way artworks inhabit, absorb or fight their context. I think the seminar is one of those contexts, and my teaching is always geared towards maintaining a sense of the text’s live happening, not just as finished product.

Undergraduate Teaching

I often teach on:

• ESH124: Poetry
• ESH213: Modernism
• ESH6064 Modern Writing and Democracy
• ESH6051: Poetry and Media

Postgraduate Teaching

I often teach

• ESH7006: Forms of Modernism

Research

Research Interests:

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry took the long view of modernist verse, setting its innovations within the longer history of the German Idealist programme for Art to be a democratic education through the precarious balance of form and material, or the work with its surroundings. Tracing these ideas through to the fragment, the found text, the difficult and the oral-ritual, the book argues that Modernist poetry is as much re-enchantment as disenchantment, and as much immersive experience as cultural high-handedness. Work on the later modernist rediscovery of performance poetry (from Afro-Modernism to Bunting) and the unavoidable self-consciousness of the sonnet form (in the Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, co-edited with A. D. Cousins) led me to wonder how other modern poets have anticipated the space of their poems’ future performance, and I have since written on Kipling in the Music Hall, the First World War poets’ sense of public ritual, and Alice Oswald’s acoustic ecology of place. In Modernism and Close Reading, ed. David James (OUP, 2020), I argue that this disciplinary staple of modern English teaching developed when modernists tried to imagine the internal performance of their work by a reader, making the work of interpretation both therapy, inverted sociology and closet drama. My interest in teaching as a kind of publication-performance led me to guest-edit a special issue of Modernist Cultures (14.3) on Modernism and/as Pedagogy, exploring the detailed relationships of writers to teaching, and opening up the conceptual and artistic impact of modernism’s teaching through experience. 

Thanks to a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, my most recent book is The Poetry Circuit  (OUP 2024), on poetry’s return to live performance in the twentieth century. It uses many long-forgotten recordings to explore how a PR opportunity rapidly became a creative moment for T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Denise Levertov. By examining how the circuit’s promoters and institutions shaped the reading as a genre, it shows how modern poetry changed because poets were now putting poems back into a co-constructed time with their audience, involving them with experimental theatre, public relations, religious ritual, celebrity confession, group psychology, race protest, apocalyptic prophecy and, of course, teaching.

My most recent research has moved into the contemporary. With the support of the AHRC, I directed The Festival as Form (2022-24), a project looking at how poets now are reading at music, family and generalist festivals. Using extensive audience research, it is the first to track in detail how festivals cue people to receive poetry, and to find that festival experiences are not only about sociality and celebration, but bring a significant portion of their audience to reflect deeply on personal change – ‘the mediation of life-crisis’, as the anthropologist David Picard describes it. I am currently working on follow-on projects on methodologies in festival audience research, and a history of the modern arts festival. Meanwhile I have continued to review for The London Review of Books and you can find various pieces here.

Publications

Books

• The Poetry Circuit (Oxford University Press, 2024)
• The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
• British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Selected Publications

• Editor and contributor, ‘Modernism and/as Pedagogy’, special issue of Modernist Cultures, 14.3 (Autumn 2019), 1-34
• ‘Marianne Moore’s Performances’, English Literary History 87.2 (2020), 553-579
• ‘Close Reading as Performance’, in Modernism and Close Reading, ed. David James (Oxford University Press, 2020), 45-68
• ‘On the Circuit’, http://woodberrypoetryroom.com/?p=993 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUsq25FEJJ8
• ‘Both Sides of the Footlights’, Stylus, November 2015. http://woodberrypoetryroom.com/?p=1737
• ‘Rudyard Kipling Plays the Empire’, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 605-620.
• ‘Form and First World War Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to First World War Poetry, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 51-66.
• ‘“Water's Soliloquy”: Soundscape and Environment in Alice Oswald's Dart’, in Poetry & Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry, ed. by D. Cooper and N. Alexander (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)
• ‘Autonomous and Heteronomous in Modernist Form: From Romantic Image to the New Modernist Studies’,Critical Quarterly, 54 (2012), 71-80 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.2012.02040
• ‘Georgian Poetry’, in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. J. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 221-30
• ‘Housman's Dirty Postcards: Poetry, Modernism, and Masochism’, PMLA, 124 (2009), 764-81
• ‘Creative Writing and Schiller's Aesthetic Education’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 41 (2007), 41-58
• ‘Rupert Brooke's Celebrity Aesthetic', English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 49 (2006), 272-92 doi:10.2487/R244-U660-1591-W007
• 'Eliot in the Underworld: the Politics of Fragmentary Form', Textual Practice, 20 (2006), 441-62 doi:10.1080/09502360600828893
• 'The Simplicity of W. H. Davies', English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 46 (2003), 155-174

Supervision

I am currently supervising one Ph.D student, Jianliang Hao, on Auden’s influence on the Chinese ‘Misty Poets’ group.

I have recently supervised and co-supervised 11 successful Ph.Ds, including the following:

• Dori Licusati, ‘Writing Out Loud: The Work of Confession from Sylvia Plath to St Augustine’, supervised with Molly MacDonald (2023). To be published as The Work of Confession from Sylvia Plath to St Augustine (Palgrave Studies in Religion and Global Literatures).
• Di Beddow, ‘The Cambridge of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’, co-supervised with Katie Fleming (2022). Part published as ‘Sylvia Plath’s Cambridge’, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath, eds. Anita Helle et al (Bloomsbury, 2022), 53-62.
• Danny Rhodes, ‘Radiant Matter: Alchemy, Radium and Field Poetics in W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound’ , co-supervised with kitt price (2021).
• John Dunn, ‘The Limits of Lyric: A Reading of Lyn Hejinian, George Oppen and Robert Duncan’, co-supervised with Mark Currie (2019). Parts published as ‘The Oppens: Disability, Disease and Late Work’, Journal of American Studies, 57.1 (2022), 1-30.
• Helen Tyson, ‘Reading Modernism’s Readers’, co-supervised with Jacqueline Rose (2016). Now published as Reading Modernism’s Readers (Edinburgh, 2024)
• Steven Quincey-Jones, ‘The Egoist and Its Own: Modernism and Intersubjectivity’ co-supervised with Suzanne Hobson (2014). Parts published as ‘Herbert Read’s Egoist Roots’, Modernism/Modernity 25.2 (2018), 389-405, and ‘Dora Marsden and the World-Inclusive I’, in Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, eds. Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford and Heather Walton (Cham: Springer, 2016), 185-199.
• Sam Solnick, 'Poetry in the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in the work of Ted Hughes, J. H. Prynne and Derek Mahon' (2013), now published as Poetry in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2018).
• Stephen Willey, 'Bob Cobbing 1950-1978: Performance, Poetry and the Institution', co-supervised with Andrea Brady (2012). Part published as ‘The Event in John Latham and Bob Cobbing’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 42.1-2, 109-126.
• Elizabeth Sarah Coles, ‘Anne Carson’, co-supervised with Jacqueline Rose (2009). Now published as Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist (OUP, 2022)

Public Engagement

My festival work has led to exhibitions at WOMAD and the Greenbelt festivals, and I write regularly for the London Review of Books. With the educational publisher Massolit, I have also made films for schools about the GCSE anthology selections of Ray Antrobus, Warsan Shire, Caleb Femi and Liz Berry, as well as First World War poetry and W. B. Yeats. Other recent / forthcoming reviews are in in African-American Review (on sonnets) and The Lamp (on William Morris).

You can read more about my media and public appearances here.