NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
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EDWARD ALEXANDER – doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of focus include modernism, 20th century American poetry and poetics, and aesthetic and critical theory. His dissertation, “Making Simplicity: Expressive Force and the Roots of Open-Form Poetics,” explores the origin and development of open-form poetry from Ezra Pound’s pre-war involvement with the Vorticist group to the mid-century work of the poets associated with Black Mountain College. The project argues that the emergence of open-form poetry from the European avant-garde’s experiments in non-representational art must be understood against the backdrop of those avant-garde artists’ interest in the ritual objects they were encountering in museums of ethnography and anthropology.
SUMAYA M. ALHAJ – Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Zarqa University, Jordan. She received her PhD. and MA. degrees in English Literature from the University of Jordan. The title of her PhD. dissertation is “The Caribbean Self: Traumatic Memory and Diaspora in the Works of V. S. Naipaul and Caryl Phillips, and the title of her MA. Thesis is “Ezra Pound’s Imagism: A New Perspective in Modern Poetry”: both were supervised by Professor Mohammed Shaheen. Her current research focuses on modern poetry, post-colonialism and identity Studies.
JOHN ALLASTER – PhD student at McGill’s University, Canada. His current research focuses on modes of originality in modernist poetry and music, especially through the lens of the improvisatory.
SEDA ŞEN ALTA – graduated from the Department of American Culture and Literature at Ankara University, Turkey in 2008 and received her MA degree in 2011 from the same department. She is a PhD candidate in English Studies writing her dissertation entitled “London-Bound: The Representations of London in Anglo-American Modernist Poetry” focusing on the representations of the city in the poems of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. She works as a full-time lecturer at Baskent University Department of American Culture and Literature since 2013, teaching survey courses on American and English literature. Her research interests and publications include modernist poetry, city poetry, graphic novels and mythmaking, 9/11 in fiction, modernist city representations, and “the tourist” image.
JACK BAKER – Tutor at Durham University, where he recently completed a PhD on the impersonal modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens.
WALTER BAUMANN – Pound scholar at the U. of Ulster. Besides his lifelong involvement in Ezra Pound studies, he published on J. W. Goethe, H. Broch, and M. Frisch. He has been active in the organisation of the international Pound conferences (EPICs) and since 1990 he has created a lasting photographic record documenting the history of our scholarly interaction over the years. His major work, Rose in the Steel Dust, is one of the classics of Pound studies. His collected essays on Ezra Pound (first published in Paideuma) are now gathered in the volume Roses in the Steel Dust and won the society book award in 2001.
ADAM COTTON – Adam’s dissertation, “Confronting Form, the Disappearing Poet and The Elegiac Trace(s) of Federico García Lorca,” is under the supervision of Professors Patricia Rae and Gabrielle McIntire at Queen’s University, Canada. This study tackles the discrepancies between the formal discord in the elegies for Lorca and the unifying theme of the murdered poet. Recently, Adam has created a course entitled Violence & Catastrophe in 20th Century Literature & Film. The syllabus includes Ezra Pound’s Canto 74 next to Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” Abel Gance’s J’accuse, Louise Bernice Halfe’s Burning in this Midnight Dream, Werner Herzog’s Invincible, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, Miklós Radnóti’s “I Cannot Know…,” and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India.
JEFF GRIENEISEN – Assistant professor of English, literature and creative writing at State College of Florida, he published his first book of poetry, Good Sumacs, with MAMMOTH Books. He was co-founder and associate editor of the annual literary journal Florida English for 13 years. His critical work includes published scholarship on Ezra Pound and Edgar Allan Poe. He has been invited to present his work in poetry and criticism in London, Paris, Venice, Edinburgh and South Tyrol. He divides his time between southwest Florida and western Pennsylvania.
A. DAVID MOODY – Prof. Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of York. He has recently completed a three volume critical biography on Ezra Pound which is also a detailed introduction to his poetry: Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & His Work. The first volume, The Young Genius 1885-1920 was published in 2007, the second, The Epic Years, 1921-1939 in 2014, and the third, The Tragic Years, 1939-1972, in 2015 by Oxford University Press.
BILJANA D. OBRADOVIĆ – Serbian-American poet and translator. She is the recipient of the NCF Award for Excellence in Research for 2015 at Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans where she is Professor of English. Her collections of poems include: Le Riche Monde (1999), Frozen Embraces (2001). Little Disruptions (2012), and the forthcoming Incognito (2017). Her poems also appeared in Three Poets in New Orleans (2000). She published Serbian translations of John Gery’s American Ghosts: Selected Poems (1999), Stanley Kunitz’s, The Long Boat (2007), Fives: Fifty Poems by Serbian and American Poets, (as editor and translator, 2002), Patrizia de Rachewiltz’s Dear Friends (2012), Bruce Weigl’s What Saves Us (2013), Niyi Osundare’s The Tongue Is a Pink Fire (2015). She published English translations from Serbian of Bratislav Milanović’s, Doors in a Meadow (2011) and is co-editor with Dubravka Djurić, of Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry from the Sixties to the Present (New Orleans: Dialogos Press, 2016). She reviews books for World Literature Today and others. Her poems have been translated into Serbian, Italian, Arabic and Korean.
ROXANA PREDA − Associate Lecturer of American literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of (Post)modern Ezra Pound (2001) and editor of Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933-1945 (2007). She currently serves as the President of the Ezra Pound Society and is senior editor of Make It New. Her current projects are Professional Attention. Ezra Pound and the Career of Modernist Criticism in collaboration with Michael Coyle and A Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts. Together with Ralf Lüfter, she is co-editing the project A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economic Thought. Her digital work in progress includes The Cantos Project, The Ezra Pound English Language Bibliography (together with Archie Henderson) and the digital Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose. In 2016 she was awarded a five-year Leverhulme fellowship for The Cantos Project.
CLAUDIO SANSONE – PhD student in comparative literature at the University of Chicago. His main interests are: epic literature (from ancient times to the present day), (post)modernist reception of the classics, and the linguistic processes behind mythological transformation.
MOHAMMED SHAHEEN – Professor of English at the University of Jordan. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University, England (King's). Since 1985, he has been a professor of English at the University of Jordan and has held several academic positions there, as well as the Mu'ta University in Jordan. Since 2007, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of Jordan University Cultural Magazine Althaqafiyyah. S. has many publications in Arabic and English in addition to some translations from and into Arabic and English. He was awarded several regional and international prizes and awards, and was offered several regional and international fellowships as well. Throughout the past years, S. was requested to organize international conferences on translation, and has been invited to all related events undertaken by the Supreme Council of Culture in Cairo, where he presented research papers and chaired sessions.
RICHARD SIEBURTH – Professor of French, English and Comparative Literature at New York University. S.’s work in Ezra Pound studies started with Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Harvard UP 1978) and continued with major and influential editing such as A Walking Tour in Southern France by Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1992), Ezra Pound: Poems & Translations (Library of America, 2003), Ezra Pound: The Pisan Cantos (New Directions, 2003), New Selected Poems and Translations by Ezra Pound (New Directions, 2010). His future project in Pound studies is an edition of Ezra Pound’s Late Venice Notebooks, which date from the final decade of his life—the heretofore unpublished private traces of the period of his terminal Lear-like silence (1962-72). His most recent translation is Songs from a Single Eye from the German of Oswald von Wolkenstein, published in a limited edition by Medus of Merano in honor of Mary de Rachewiltz’s 90th birthday. In addition, S. has published translations of books by Hölderlin, Büchner, Benjamin, Scholem, Nostradamus, Scève, Labé, Nerval, Michaux, Leiris, and Guillevic. He is currently working on a translation/edition of Late Baudelaire for Yale UP.