Associate Professor Sean Pryor
BA (Hons 1) USyd. (2000); MPhil USyd. (2003); PhD Cantab. (2007).
Ìý
I am an Associate Professor in English in the School of the Arts and Media. I received my BA and MPhil from the University of Sydney and my PhD from the University of Cambridge. I joined 91É«ÇéƬ in 2008 on a Faculty Postdoctoral Fellowship. I was appointed a Lecturer in English in 2010 and then awarded a three-year ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2011. I was Acting Director (2014) and then Deputy Director (2016) of the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at 91É«ÇéƬ, and since 2013 I have been a co-editor ofÌý, an open-access journal of modern literature and culture and the official journal of the . I am an active member of 91É«ÇéƬ's Literary Provocations Hub.
I like to think about poetry—about how poems help us think, about how poems are put together, about the history of all those strange and wonderful things called "poem", and about the history which binds poems to society at large. My research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth century poetry and poetics, and especially on modernism. I'm interested in the intersections of poetry with philosophy and with religion; in the history and theory of verse-making; and in cultures of publication and circulation. I am currently working on a history of the concept of poetic technique.
Most recently, I edited theÌýÌý(2024). InÌýÌý(Cambridge University Press,Ìý2017), I argue that the formal experiments of modernist poems by T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Mina Loy, Joseph Macleod, and Wallace Stevens figure poetry itself as complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of modernity. InÌýÌý(Ashgate, 2011), I examine the association of poetry with paradise which shaped the development of Yeats's and Pound's poetry. With Ben Etherington, I co-editedÌýa special issue ofÌýCritical QuarterlyÌýon (2019) and, with David Trotter, I co-edited aÌýcollection of essays on literature and technology,ÌýÌý(Open Humanities Press,Ìý2016). My essays have appeared in journals such as ELH,ÌýModernism/modernity,ÌýThe Review of English Studies,ÌýEssays in Criticism, andÌýVictorian Studies, as well as in several edited collections.
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
I am co-editor ofÌý.
I peer-review work for numerous presses (including Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury, and Open Humanities Press) and journals (includingÌýModernism/modernity,ÌýPaideuma,ÌýIrish Studies Review, andÌýReligion and Literature).
My Teaching
I teach ARTS2033 Poetry and Poetics andÌýARTS2034 Shakespearean Drama.ÌýOccasionally I contribute lectures to, or take seminars in, other courses in English.
PhD Supervisions
Rebecca Zhou, "Ideogrammic Poetry in the Time of Semiocapital" (2024)
Mariya Nikolova, "How Whiteness Claimed the Future. The Always New Vs. the Always Now in US-American Literature" (2020)
Tanya Thaweeskulchai, "Expressing Bodily Experience: Virginia Woolf'sÌýMrs DallowayÌýandÌýThe Waves" (2018), together with the poetry collections A Salivating Monstrous PlantÌý(Cordite, 2017) andÌýAshes and Fire in the House of PortraitsÌý(2018).
Christopher Oakey, "Philosophical Poetry in a Time of Crisis: Reading Post-War American Poetry in Relation to Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy" (2017)
Masters by Research Supervisions
Kristin Grogan, "Strange Rhythms: Experimental Lyric Poetry in Late Modernism" (2014)
Christopher Oakey, "Vision, Affect and Knowledge in the Poetry of Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams" (2012)