Susan Rosenbaum

Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.
Associate Professor
Co-Director, Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop

Susan Rosenbaum is an Associate Professor with research and teaching interests in American literature, modern poetry and poetics, modernism and the visual arts, women writers, cultural and gender studies, and digital humanities. She is the author of Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (University of Virginia Press, 2007) and co-author, with Suzanne Churchill (Davidson College) and Linda Kinnahan (Duquesne University), of Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (2020), a peer-reviewed, digital, multimedia scholarly book supported by a 2017-2019 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. This project received the 2022 MLA Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship, the 2023 Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, Honorable Mention for the 2020 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities (American Studies Association), and UGA's Creative Research Medal (2024). The print companion, a co-authored monograph Travels with Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, is forthcoming from Lever Press. 

Other research projects which are underway include Imaginary Museums: Surrealism, Modern Poetry, and the Visual Arts, 1920-1970, an archive-intensive project supported by a  Summer NEH Fellowship and a Willson Center Fellowship. She is also collaboratively writing a scholarly monograph with Dr. Jonathan Ellis at Sheffield University on poet Elizabeth Bishop's engagements with visual art and visual media, provisonally titled an Art of Looks. With Dr. Ellis and Dr. Ronald Patkus, Director of Special Collections at the Vassar College Libraries, she has curated an exhibition of Elizabeth Bishop's Picture Postcards, with an accompanying catalog and digital exhibit. The physical exhibit was on display in the Vassar College Libraries in Fall 2023, with plans for further travel, and has been reviewed in The Miscellany News, On the Seawall, the TLS, the Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books. 

With Nell Andrew in Art History, and Rielle Navitski in Theater/Film, she co-directs the Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop, a Willson Center Research Cluster.  She has twice received the Martha Munn Bedingfield Excellence in Teaching Award. Recent seminars she has taught include "Poetics: The Prose Poem," "Poetics: the Modern Pastoral," "Poetics: History/Theory of the Lyric," "The Modern American Long Poem," "Modernisms in the U.S.," "Museums, Modernism, Memory," "American Poetry 1913-1960," "American Poetry and the Everyday," "American Women Poets and Experiment," and "Elizabeth Bishop: New Perspectives."

Education:

Ph.D. English literature, University of Michigan, 1997

B.A. English literature & Pre-Medical Studies, Yale University, 1990

Selected Publications:

Recent essays:

Susan Rosenbaum and Jonathan Ellis. "Elizabeth Bishop's Picture Postcards." Introduction to Exhibition Catalog, and related Online Exhibition. Vassar College Libraries, Fall 2023. Reviewed in TLS and On the Seawall.

Susan Rosenbaum, "Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy." Humanities 2022, 11, 113. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050113

Susan Rosenbaum, Suzanne Churchill, and Linda Kinnahan. "Handiwork: Mina Loy, Collage, and the En Dehors Garde." Visualities Forum Vol. 5 Cycle 2, Ed. Alix Beeston. Modernism/Modernity Print+. October 21, 2020.

Review of  Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (Rebecca Sanchez. New York and London: NYU Press. 2015); Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (Steve Pinkerton. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2017); Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (Will Norman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 2016). American Literature 92.2 (June 2020): 394-396.

Susan Rosenbaum, Suzanne Churchill, and Linda Kinnahan. "Digital Baedeker: A Feminist Experiment with Mina Loy's Archive" in Linda Anderson, Ed. The Poetics of the Archive. Edinburgh UP, 2019.

"The Case of the Falling S: Elizabeth Bishop, Visual Poetry, and the International Avant-Garde." Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion. Ed. Jonathan Ellis. Edinburgh UP, 2019.

Susan Rosenbaum, Linda Kinnahan, and Suzanne Churchill. "Feminist Designs: Modernist Digital Humanities and Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde." Feminist  Modernist Studies. Summer 2018.

“Brides Stripped Bare: Transformations of Surrealist Spectatorship in U.S. Women’s Collections.”  Special issue of Dada/Surrealism, “Exhibitions and Display in Dada and Surrealism.” Ed. Kathryn Floyd. 21.1 (Fall 2017).

“The ‘do it yourself avant-garde’: Twentieth-Century American Women Poets and Experiment.” Ed. Linda Kinnahan. Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2015.

“Modernism: The Next Generation.” Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry. eds. Gail Macdonald and David Chinitz. Wiley-Blackwell 2014.

“Elizabeth Bishop and the Natural World.” Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop. eds. Jonathan Ellis and Angus Cleghorn. Cambridge UP 2014.

“‘Permeation, Ventilation, Occlusion’: Reading John Ashbery & Joe Brainard’s The Vermont Notebook in the Tradition of Surrealist Collaboration.” Mark Silverberg, ed. Collaboration and The New York School: The Color of Vowels. Palgrave Macmillan 2013.

“Mixed Feelings: Ashbery, Duchamp, Roussel, and the Animation of Cliché.” Invited essay in special issue, “The Critics, The Poets.” Eds. Heather White and Luke Carson.  Genre 45.1 (Spring 2012): 87-119.

“Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920-1960.” Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson. Oxford UP: 2012.

“A Conversation with Eileen Myles.” February 22, 2011. Verse 28 no. 3/ 29 no. 1 (Fall 2012).

“Elizabeth Bishop and the Miniature Museum.” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 28.2 (2005): 61-99.

Articles on “Cliché” and “Confessional Poetry.” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Roland Greene, Jahan Ramazani. Princeton UP: 2012.

Earlier publications include essays on Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Studies in Romanticism), Elizabeth Bishop (Journal of Modern Literature, Reading the Middle Generation Anew), Frank O'Hara (New Work on New York School Poets), and Mina Loy and Alice Notley (HOW2). 

Contact Information

srosenb@uga.edu
Office: Park Hall 140
Office Hours:
Thurs. 11-12:00 and by appointment

Other Information


View Directory

Support English at UGA

We greatly appreciate your generosity. Your gift enables us to offer our students and faculty opportunities for research, travel, and any number of educational events that augment the classroom experience. Support the efforts of the Department of English by visiting our giving section. 

Give Now 

EVERY DOLLAR CONTRIBUTED TO THE DEPARTMENT HAS A DIRECT IMPACT ON OUR STUDENTS AND FACULTY.