Harris Feinsod

Harris Feinsod

Research Professor

Contact Information

Research Interests: Literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world; poetry and poetics; oceanic studies and environmental humanities; theories of history; transnational, global, and hemispheric approaches to literature and culture.

Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. His teaching and research encompass poetry, modernism and the avant-garde in Europe and the hemispheric Americas, and transnational studies. His recent work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of oceans, coasts, and working waterfronts under conditions of globalization and environmental instability. He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford (2011) and an A.B. from Brown (2004), both in Comparative Literature.

Feinsod’s first book, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, hardcover 2017/paperback 2019), offers a detailed literary history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America amidst the political transformations of the mid-twentieth century. He is now at work on “Into Steam: The Worlds of Modernism at Sea.” A global account of transoceanic and dockside poetry, narrative fiction, visual art, and radical history in the early twentieth century, “Into Steam” charts modernist culture as viewed from its industrializing seaways. These projects were supported by fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center, and the National Humanities Center.

Feinsod’s essays appear in popular and scholarly venues such as American Literary History, The Baffler, In These Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modernism/modernity, n+1 and Post45. He also collaborates on translations and large-scale editorial projects. He is the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin), of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018), which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry. He directs Open Door Archive, a digital platform featuring reissues of neglected print cultures of the Americas. Previously, he served as assistant editor for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition (2012). With Leah Feldman and Peter Kalliney, he is co-editing a global anthology of anticolonial thought. He is currently elected Chair of Publications on the American Comparative Literature Association Board of Directors.

Before coming to Hopkins, Feinsod spent over a decade at Northwestern University, where he held appointments and affiliations in English, Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese, and Environment, Policy and Culture. Dedicated to research mentorship, he has served on more than 25 PhD dissertation committees.

In progress

  • “Into Steam: The Worlds of Modernism at Sea” (book)
  • “Anticolonial Writing” (anthology, co-edited with Leah Feldman and Peter Kalliney) 

Articles and Essays

Reviews

Interviews

Occasional Essays

  • “Rhyme at the End of Democracy: Leonard Cohen’s Futures,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (Dec 20, 2016)
  • “#DownWithCentennialism,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (9 Sept, 2015)
  • “Para-Library Science at the NYPL,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities & the World (3 March, 2014)
  • “Glosses and Conjectures on the Inaugural Poem,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities and the World (28 Jan, 2013)    
  • “The Tolson Exception: The Anthology in the 21st Century,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (9 Jan, 2012)

Reference