Jed Rasula

Jed Rasula has been the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor at UGA since 2001, and Head of the English Department from 2014 to 2017. He received his PhD from UC Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Program. Before pursuing a doctoral degree, Rasula worked in radio and television in Hollywood, and edited the poetry magazine Wch Way (1976-84). From 1990-2000 he was on the editorial board of the journal Sulfur. His poetry titles include Tabula Rasula (1986), Hot Wax, or Psyche’s Drip (2007), and Hectic Pigment (2017) as well as numerous translations in his anthologies Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity co-edited with Tim Conley (2012) and Imagining Language co-edited with Steve McCaffery (1998).

Rasula’s recent scholarly titles are a history of Dada, Destruction Was My Beatrice (Basic Books 2015), History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford U.P. 2016), and Acrobatic Modernism, from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (Oxford U.P. 2020). Forthcoming are Genre and Extravagance in the Novel (Oxford 2021) Wreading: A Potential Intelligence (U. Alabama P. 2021), and a book about the impact of "The Waste Land" on modern poetry, What the Thunder Said (Princeton U.P. 2022). Previous publications include The American Poetry Wax Museum (1996), This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (2002), Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (2004), and Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (2009).

Rasula has served terms on the advisory board of PMLA and the editorial board of American Literature. He has frequently been a consultant to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and to the Library of America, and served as consultant to the PBS documentary film Harlem in Montmartre.

Honors include the General Electric Younger Writers Award (1987), the Frank Knox Award for Excellence in Teaching (Queen’s University 1992), the Postmodern Culture prize for best essay (1999), and the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin (2009), and the Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association for History of a Shiver.

Rasula’s courses at UGA have generally been special topics graduate seminars. Examples: ENGL 8600, Innovations in Critical Writing; ENGL 6830, Theory and Practice of the Avant-Garde; ENGL 8600, “Armed With Madness”: Consciousness in extremis in Modern Fiction; ENGL 6774, Modern American Poetry; ENGL 6830, Contemporary Poetics in Theory and Practice; ENGL 8600, Kafka and the Kafkaesque; ENGL 6740, Encyclopedic Form in American Poetry; ENGL 8600, Metropolitan Modernity; ENGL 6830, Modern Fiction, Theory and Practice; ENGL 8600, Varieties of Poetic Experience; ENGL 8600, Close Reading; ENGL 6830, Aesthetics and Modernity; ENGL 8600, Pleasure and the Text; ENGL 6830, Varieties of Aesthetic Experience; ENGL 8600, Encyclopedic Respiration in the Long Poem.