Document
Matthew Kilbane
Election
Position
Name
Matthew Kilbane
Candidate statement
Assistant Professor of English, University of Notre Dame
I’m a scholar of modern poetry, media history, and digital culture. My first book, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (JHUP, 2024), a title in the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series, unfolds a disciplinary meeting place for literary and media studies by opening the modernist archive to such things as pop songs, radio poems, closet operas, and speech-music. In more recent essays on poetry's social life, I have written about Octavio Paz, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Hope Mirrlees, Gwendolyn Brooks, and George Oppen, among others. My next book project, “The Ends of Poetry,” begins its revisionary history of twentieth-century literary institutions with under-studied modernist hangouts like the Dil Pickle Club and Raven Poetry Circle. I’m also editing a volume on the interdisciplinary wunderkind Mark Turbyfill, a poet, ballet dancer, and painter who spent his life on modernist art—relentlessly, and with an elated trust in its promise to remake the world. As Vice Program Chair of MSA, I’d look forward especially to helping 1) realize the organization’s interdisciplinary promise, 2) augment its utility for graduate students and precarious scholars, and 3) reaffirm modernist studies—in the face of hiring trends—as a critical project indispensable to the contemporary humanities.
Four Recent Publications:
-The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
-“Plastic Paris,” Modernism/modernity Print+, in “Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @100,”, eds. Nell Wasserstrom and Rio Matchett, 10 July 2025.
-Langston Hughes, “Street Scenes: Langston Hughes, Lyric Pop, and Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire,” American Literature96, no. 3 (2024): 443-72.
-“Muriel Rukeyser’s Idea of Poetry: A History of Abstraction,” Modernist Cultures 19, no. 2-3 (2024): 312-333.
I’m a scholar of modern poetry, media history, and digital culture. My first book, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (JHUP, 2024), a title in the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series, unfolds a disciplinary meeting place for literary and media studies by opening the modernist archive to such things as pop songs, radio poems, closet operas, and speech-music. In more recent essays on poetry's social life, I have written about Octavio Paz, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Hope Mirrlees, Gwendolyn Brooks, and George Oppen, among others. My next book project, “The Ends of Poetry,” begins its revisionary history of twentieth-century literary institutions with under-studied modernist hangouts like the Dil Pickle Club and Raven Poetry Circle. I’m also editing a volume on the interdisciplinary wunderkind Mark Turbyfill, a poet, ballet dancer, and painter who spent his life on modernist art—relentlessly, and with an elated trust in its promise to remake the world. As Vice Program Chair of MSA, I’d look forward especially to helping 1) realize the organization’s interdisciplinary promise, 2) augment its utility for graduate students and precarious scholars, and 3) reaffirm modernist studies—in the face of hiring trends—as a critical project indispensable to the contemporary humanities.
Four Recent Publications:
-The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
-“Plastic Paris,” Modernism/modernity Print+, in “Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @100,”, eds. Nell Wasserstrom and Rio Matchett, 10 July 2025.
-Langston Hughes, “Street Scenes: Langston Hughes, Lyric Pop, and Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire,” American Literature96, no. 3 (2024): 443-72.
-“Muriel Rukeyser’s Idea of Poetry: A History of Abstraction,” Modernist Cultures 19, no. 2-3 (2024): 312-333.
Candidate CV