academic employment
2002-9 :
Ph.D., Department of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
1994-8 :
A.B. (cum laude), Committee on Degrees in History and Literature (American), Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts
1990-4 :
Regents Diploma (highest honors), New York State Department of Education, Geneva City School District, Geneva, New York
honors
research and teaching interests
American Literatures & Cultures (1898-present); Modern & Contemporary Poetries & Poetics; Film, Media, Performance, and Visual Studies;
Comparative, Multiethnic, and Transnational American Studies; Cultural Geography; Cultural Studies; Digital Humanities; Literary Theory; University Studies
publications
articles, book chapters, and review essays
"Putting Pablo Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu In Its Places," forthcoming in
Geography and the Humanities: 21st Century Convergences, ed. Douglas Richardson, Denis Cosgrove, Dydia DeLyser, and Jim Ketchum
(New York: Routledge, 2011): 143-154.
"'Upsettin da Setuppa': Vincent Ferrini's Vernacular Poetics," forthcoming in Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture: A Decade and Beyond of Insights and Challenges, ed. Dennis
Barone and Peter Covino (New York: Bordighera P/Calandra Institute/CUNY P, 2011): 46-66.
"Olson as Educator," The Worcester Review 31.1-2 (2010): 58-69.
"Renunciations of Rhyme in Byron's Don Juan,"
SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 49.4 (Autumn 2009): 841-862.
"The Keeping of Ray A. Young Bear,"
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29.2-3 (Spring and Fall 2007): 282-302.
"How the University Unmakes" (review essay on academic labor addressing works by Marc
Bousquet, Christopher Newfield, et al.) the minnesota review ns 70 (Fall 2008): 185-194.
"Eyes on the University" (review essay on the university as an institution addressing works by
Derek Bok, Jacques Derrida, et al.) the minnesota review ns 67 (Fall 2006): 143-52.
reference entries and shorter reviews
Entries on "Cadence"; "Dimeter"; "Onomatopoeia"; "Syllable," forthcoming in The Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman. 4th ed. (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2011)
Entries on "Peter Blue Cloud/Aroniawenrate"; "nila northSun"; "James Wright," in Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Poetry. Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Ed. Roger Thompson and J. Scott Bryson (Detroit: Gale/Thompson, 2008): 31-5; 260-4; 346-52.
Entry on "David Berman," in Encyclopedia Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia Foundation
for the Humanities, 2008).
"The Thinking Man's Guide to The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" (on Slavoj Zizek); "Ecosophy from T to X" (on Arne Naess); "Leaving the Rothko Chapel" (on Mark Rothko), n+1 (November 2007; April 2006; August 2005).
Entries on "Bill Berkson"; "Tom Clark"; "Four Quartets," in The Facts on File Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Burt Kimmelman.
(New York: Facts on File, 2005): 37-8; 92-3; 170-1.
Rev. of Rising Up and Rising Down, by William T. Vollmann, Meridian 13 (2004): 154-7.
Rev. of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Ed. Ilan Stavans, Meridian 12 (2003): 127-8.
Rev. of Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952-1954 and A Possible World, by Kenneth Koch, Meridian 11 (2003): 130-2.
Rev. of Political Fictions, by Joan Didion, The Hartford Courant (2001 September 23): G3.
Rev. of Brink Road, by A.R. Ammons, The Harvard Advocate 132.2 (1997): 3-4.
digital scholarship
Olsoniana. Resources for the study of Charles Olson, including a bibliography and a gazetteer.
poetry collections
Bright Day: First Poems. Charlottesville: Mirador P, 2005.
invited talks
"Stanley Kunitz's Cracked Vocation," invited talk, Twenty-Second Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, Boston, Massachusetts, May 2011
"'Making a Mappemunde': Cartographical Tools for Understanding Ezra Pound's Cantos and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems," invited talk, Association of American Geographers,
Seattle, Washington, April 2011
"Using Geography's Toolkit: New Directions in Humanities Scholarship," invited panel chair, Association of American Geographers, Seattle, Washington, April 2011
"Olson as Educator," invited talk, The Charles Olson Centenary, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 2010
"Jeffers in New Mexico: Modernism, Poetry, Place," public lecture, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 2009
"Below: Myung Mi Kim, A Typical Korean American Poet of Place," invited talk, Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 2007
conference presentations
"A Northern Southern Italian of the Eastern Western United States: A Topographical Analysis of
John Fante's Fiction." Terre Promesse: Excursions Towards Italian Topographies, John
D. Calandra Italian American Institute, CUNY, New York, New York, April 2010
"Time in Immigrant Space: The Conflicted Temporalities of Gay Talese's Unto the Sons."
Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms: The Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 2010
"'Upsettin da Setuppa': Vincent Ferrini's Dialect Poetry." Session Organized by the Italian American Literature Discussion Group at the
125th Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 2009
"Kamau Brathwaite and the Roots of Caribbean Relation." Complicating the Compass:
Displacing Directionality in American Studies, U. of Colorado, Boulder, September 2008
"Should the Meskwaki Speak? or, Ray A. Young Bear's Environmental Ethics." Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 2008
"The Moderations of William Carlos Williams's Paterson."
Geographies of Visual and Literary Culture: Ninth Annual Modernist Studies Association Conference.
U. of Southern California and California State U. Long Beach, Long Beach, California, November 2007
"Putting Pablo Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu In Its Places."
Geography and the Humanities Symposium,
Association of American Geographers, American Council of Learned Societies,
and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 2007
"Borders Remade as Arteries: The Place of the River in Chicano and Québécois Poetry."
International Conference on Rivers and Civilization: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Major River Systems.
University of Wisconsin La Crosse. La Crosse, Wisconsin, June 2006
"Networks of Affiliation and Dematerialization in Recent Korean American Poetry."
Fifth Annual American Cultures Conference,
The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, March 2006
"If It's Real Broke, Why Fix It: Bruce Andrews and Experimental Poetry." Seminar on "Experimental Poetics: 1580 to the Present,"
Eleventh Meeting of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 2005
"Robinson Jeffers As Poet of Dislocation."
Being in the World, Living with the Land:
The Sixth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment,
University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, June 2005
"What's New Is Old Again: Embodying Rhetoric in the Digital Age."
Computers and Writing 2005: New Writing and Computer Technologies,
Stanford University, Stanford, California, June 2005
"Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris Smith and the Masonic-Mormon Nexus."
Researching New York: Perspectives on Empire State History,
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York, November 2003
"Shallow Water in the Poetry of Robert Frost and A.R. Ammons."
Fourteenth Annual Conference of the American Literature Association,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 2003
teaching
2009- :
Assistant Professor,
Department of Humanities & Arts,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts
Textual Engineering. Seminar with focus on archival materials including manuscripts, rare books, and other holdings in local, regional, and digital repositories. 2011 Spring, 2010 Spring.
Modern American Poetry. Selected works of poetry from Whitman and Dickinson to the present. 2011 Spring.
Literature, Film, Place. Seminar with focus on works that highlight "the sense of place," evoking connections between the local, regional, national, and planetary frames. 2010 Fall.
American Drama. Selected works of drama from the eighteenth century to the present. 2010 Fall.
Creative Writing. Presentation and discussion of original work in either fiction or poetry. 2011 Spring, 2010 Spring, 2009 Fall.
Modern American Novel. Selected works of fiction which appeared after World War I. 2010 Spring.
Introduction to Literature. Coverage of critical perspectives and major forms, or genres, of literary expression. 2009 Fall.
2010 :
Faculty, Language and Thinking Program, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Intensive three-week liberal arts seminar for matriculating students.
2008
Lecturer, Department of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Contemporary American Poetry.
Self-designed English Department lecture course for majors covering stylistic and thematic trends from Olson and Bishop to the present moment. 2008 Spring.
From Stage to Screen. Self-designed English Department seminar: drama and film survey with attention to stage-screen adaptations, material culture, media studies, and performance theory incl. plays by
Shakespeare,
Jonson,
Ibsen,
Wilde,
Shaw,
Brecht,
Stoppard,
Mamet &c. and films by
Chaplin,
Ford,
Hitchcock,
Kurosawa,
Lynch,
Truffaut,
Vidor,
Welles, &c.
2008 Spring.
2003-7 :
Graduate Instructor, Department of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
The U.S.A. Through Other Eyes. Self-designed English Department seminar for prospective majors: literature and culture survey with emphases on autobiography, cultural criticism, performance art and travel literature incl.
Equiano,
Apess,
Tocqueville,
Martineau,
Dickens,
Martí,
Lorca,
James,
Beuys,
Naipaul,
Baudrillard,
Gómez-Peña,
Trask,
et al. 2007 Spring.
Special Collections. Self-designed English Department seminar for non-majors: multi-genre American literature survey including
Irving, Whitman, Crane, Frost, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, et al.,
organized via holdings of the Small Special Collections Library, attention to holograph manuscripts and rare editions in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library. 2005 Fall.
Being Convincing. Self-designed Writing Program seminar for first-years: attention to five canons of classical rhetoric with emphasis on invention and delivery; focus on multimedia materials; instruction in composition relating to the academic essay, digital semiotics and public speaking. 2005 Fall ; 2005 Spring.
History of Literature in English III. . English Department survey for majors: teaching assistant for Professors Paul Cantor and Victor Luftig; section leader for weekly discussions; third in a series covering history of English Literature; focus on Anglophone 20th c., incl.
Joyce,
Woolf,
Eliot,
Yeats,
O'Neill,
Coetzee,
Rich,
Walcott,
et al. 2003 Fall.
2004-7 :
Graduate Instructor, Media Studies Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Introduction to Digital Media Studies. Introductory Media Studies survey: teaching assistant for Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan ('07), for Professor Johanna Drucker ('06) and for Professor David Golumbia ('04); course lectures on "digital selves," the user-generated internet, and ecology and digital media; weekly discussions and web design labs; attention to cultural, economic and social significances of IT, instruction in HTML and CSS. 2007 Fall; 2006 Fall; 2004 Fall.
Collage and New Media. Self-designed Media Studies seminar for third and fourth-year majors: attention to IT and experimentation in filmic, literary, musical, performing and visual arts; focus on aesthetic and political implications of collage techniques as practiced in digital environments; syllabus via collective web authorship; creative emphasis for final projects. 2004 Spring.
secondary teaching experience
2002 :
History Instructor, York School, Monterey, California
1999 :
Humanities Dean, The American School of Tangier, Tangier, Morocco
1998 :
Stowe/Harvard Fellow, Stowe School, Buckingham, England
related experience
Research Assistant, The Bedford Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English, ed. J.
Paul Hunter and Cynthia Wall (New York: Bedford, 2012)
Editorial Assistant, Declaring Independence: The Origin and Influence of America's Founding Document, ed. Peter S. Onuf & Christian Y. Dupont (Charlottesville: U. of Virginia Library, 2007)
academic service
2011- :
Member, Curriculum Advisory Committee, Exploration Summer Programs
2011 :
Member, Class of 1879 Prize Committee, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
2010-15 :
Executive Committee Member, Italian American Literature Discussion Group, MLA
2010 :
Co-Advisor, Venice (Italy) Project Center, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
2010 :
Workshop Designer, The Places Poems Make: A Professional Development Workshop Series, Worcester County Poetry Association and Worcester Public Schools, 2010
2010 :
Member, Writing Committee, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
2009-10 :
Member, Education Development Council, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
2007 :
Departmental Representative, Virginia Council of Graduate Schools Research Forum
2006-7 :
Pedagogy Mentor, Professional and Academic Writing Program, University of Virginia
2005 :
Student Committee on Program Reform, English Department, University of Virginia
2002-2007 :
Undergraduate Admissions Interviewer, Schools Committee, Harvard College
languages
Spanish: (semi-fluent); French, Italian, Portuguese: (proficient); (X)HTML + CSS
affiliations
references available upon request
last modified : jim cocola : 2011.01.29 21.20
[jcocola at wpi dot edu]