Faculty Bios

My primary field of study is early modern literature, with a secondary field in literature of the Middle Ages. My research coheres around a broad set of questions about how stories of violence are told and retold. I’m interested in the literary structures that organize and rehearse acts of violence, especially structures that rely on the audience’s recognition of an old death in a new form. In particular, my work looks at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reiterations of historical, literary, and religious scenes of violence that are inherited from earlier models, be they biblical, patristic, medieval, or relatively contemporary. My work considers the forms reiteration takes in the context of discrete historical moments of literary production, considering how both sedimented and emerging literary structures exert constitutive pressure over historical events. These interests have led to two main projects focused on rather disparate literary materials. The first is a forthcomin...

Hunter undertakes the typical peregrina (pilgrim) activity of washing clothing at the end of a day of walking while on the 500 mile traditional medieval pilgrimage to Compostela de Santiago       My teaching and research focus on medieval literature and the reception of philosophical ideas in the Middle Ages. My book, Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies , from Routledge Press, explores the reception of Boethius through the creation and reception of a thirteenth-century forgery that presented itself as a sequel to The Consolation of Philosophy . My current work looks at how early logic curriculum shaped the work of Chaucer. My interest in how cultural fantasies about the past and the present shape reception histories informs the courses I teach on Medieval Romance, The Fabulous Middle Ages, and Chaucer.  Courses: Chaucer; Medieval Romance; Literature of Heaven and Hell; The Fabulous Middle Ages; British Tradition, I. Publication: “Remena...

My teaching and research focus on modern American poetry, though my interests often lead me out from that center—both horizontally (into twentieth-century American literature and culture) and vertically (into the long history of poetry and poetics). My current book project, Bedlam & Parnassus: The Institutional Life of Modern American Poetry , begins by observing the historical coincidence that, from where they sat in 1950, both Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop could observe the dome of the United States Capitol. What makes that coincidence fascinating is the stark difference in their circumstances. Bishop was serving a one-year term as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position we now call Poet Laureate); the view from her corner office was meant to signal her proximity to power. Pound, on the other hand, was an inmate in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He would be confined there for thirteen years in order to avoid being prosecuted on tr...

My focus is on contemporary poetry and poetics, both as a scholar and practitioner. In the graduate program, I teach courses on contemporary poetry, documentary poetry, feminist theory, ecopoetics, and environmental theory. At the undergraduate level, I also regularly teach creative writing courses with a focus on poetry. I have published critical essays on contemporary North American poetry and poetics including essays on Louise Glück, Brenda Hillman, and Frank Bidart, and have contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Post-1945 American Poetry, A Companion to Poetic Genre , and The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century American Women’s Poetry . I am co-editor of three collections of critical essays that focus on 21st century North American poets, most recently North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language , with Kazim Ali. I have also published four full-length collections of poetry and a new book, Flood Plain will appear in January 2025. My po...