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BA(Hons), PhD (Auck); Te Pīnakitanga ki te Reo Kairangi (Te Wānanga o Aotearoa)

Emailjacob.edmond@otago.ac.nzheadshot Jacob Edmond Dec 2019
Tel +64 3 479 7969

Office
1S3, First Floor
Arts Building
Albany Street
Dunedin

Mail
English and Linguistics
University of Otago
PO Box 56
Dunedin 9054
New Zealand

External webpages

Expertise

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry in English, Chinese and Russian; modernism and postmodernism; the avant-garde; literary theory; literature and politics; comparative literature.

Teaching

  • ENGL 121 English Literature: The Remix
  • ENGL 131 Controversial Classics
  • ENGL 219 Poetry and Music
  • ENGL 222 Literature and Activism: The Art of Protest
  • ENGL 319 Poetic Revolt from Soho to Social Media
  • ENGL 469 Writing Revolutions: How Modernism Changed the World

Current postgraduate supervisions

  • Stacey Kokaua-Balfour, “Akapapa'anga as 'subjective world building': A practice in Indigenous ecocriticism” (PhD)
  • Liz Breslin, “On the Trail of the Mother of Invention: Unsettled Stories of Colonised Central Otago (A Creative-Critical Project)” (PhD)
  • Essa May Ranapiri,  “Mana Takatāpui: Queer Indigenous Poetry Networks” (PhD)
  • Rushi Vyas, “Poetry, Ritual, and Decolonization” (A Creative-Critical Project)" (PhD)
  • Louise Wallace, "Good Form: Womanhood in Contemporary Long-Form Narrative Poetry” (A Creative-Critical PhD Project)
  • Jasmine Gallagher, “The New Sincerity in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry and Art” (PhD)
  • Mere Taito, "Waywriting a collection of multilingual Fäeag Rotuạm ta-English poetry: A creative option for Rotuman language regeneration in Aotearoa, NZ" (PhD)

Find out more about our postgraduate students

Previously supervised postgraduate theses

Current research projects

Technologies of World Literature

News of the World: The Global Poetics of the Newspaper,
a project supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Publications

Books

Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media.New York: Columbia UP, 2019.
For a discussion of the book, see youtube.com/watch?v=l-TnpFZkWq8
Shortlisted for the 2020 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. New York: Fordham UP, 2012. A talk on this book is available.
Honorable Mention, 2013 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association
Runner-up, 2013 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize

Edited books and special issues

Wong, Lorraine C. M., and Jacob Edmond, eds. "The Chinese Script and Its Global Imaginary,” a thematic group of essays in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 40 (2018).

Edmond, Jacob, ed. The Indiscipline of Comparison, spec. issue of Comparative Literature Studies 53.4 (2016).

Edmond, Jacob, and Henry Johnson, eds. Asia in New Zealand Lives, spec. issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 16.2 (December 2014).

Edmond, Jacob, Henry Johnson, and Jacqueline Leckie, eds. Recentring Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities. Leiden: Brill / Global Oriental, 2011. Read the introduction here.

Ed. Representing Asia, Remaking New Zealand in Contemporary New Zealand Culture, spec. issue of New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies(June 2008) . [Builds on an eponymous symposium that I convened.]

Ed. (with Gregory O'Brien, Evgeny Pavlov and Ian Wedde.) Russia, Spec. issue of Landfall 213 (2007).

Ed., intro., and trans. (with Hilary Chung). Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland. By Yang Lian. Auckland: Auckland UP, 2006.

Selected recent and upcoming talks

“Translation Poems, Translated Fields.” Translation Studies for Modern Chinese Literature symposium. University of Toronto, 28 September 2023.

“Total Confusion: Making and Confounding Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Cross-Readings from the Newspaper.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 53rd Annual Conference. St Louis, 9 March 2023.

“Making the News, Mapping Relation; or, What's Wrong with Modernism.” AMSN 5: Cultures of Modernity, Australasian Modernist Studies 2022 conference. University of Auckland, 12–14 December.

“Same Old Story: The Poetry of the News.” Keynote address to the conference Expanded Poetry: The Poetics and Politics of Repetition; Poesia Expandida: Poéticas e Políticas da Repetição, Institute for Comparative Literature, University of Porto (online), 25 November 2022.

“Literature as Translation: Bei Dao beyond World Poetry.” Translatability/Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World. An online symposium Hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara and Lingnan University. 8 October 2022.

“Newspaper Poetics: News Media and World Literature.” American Comparative Literature Association 2022 Annual Meeting. National Taiwan Normal University, 15–18 June 2022.

“The Confusing Swirl.” Contribution to the panel “Associative Energies: The Crosswalk between Nonfiction and Poetry.” 8th NonfictioNOW conference, Massey University, Wellington, December 3–5, 2021.

“Two Pathways to the Sea: Contrary Currents in Local and Global Environmental Humanities.” Ngā tohu o te huarere: Conversations beyond human scales. 8th ASLEC-ANZ conference, Wellington, 23–26 November 2021.

“Poetry and Breath: Resuscitating Literature, Reimagining the World.” Inaugural Professorial Lecture, University of Otago, 15 April 2021. youtube.com/watch?v=bem03j1ndqc

“The Dirty Word: A View on Comparison from Aotearoa / New Zealand.” Invited contribution to the American Comparative Literature Association Vice Presidential seminar “Geopolitics of Comparison around the World.” American Comparative Literature Association 2021 Annual Meeting, online, 11 April 2021. Recording of session at youtube.com/watch?v=AwR01f6Bh0I

“Newsfeed Literature.” American Comparative Literature Association 2021 Annual Meeting, online, 11 April 2021.

“News Media, Poetry, World Form.” Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Colloquium. University of California, Berkeley, 8 March 2021.

Articles

"Literature as Translation: Bei Dao beyond World Poetry." "Translatability / Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World," special issue of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 20.1 (2023):139-62.

Against Global Literary Studies.” New Global Studies 15.2–3 (2021): 193–226.

Points of Reference: Citing Kamau Brathwaite Decolonizing Citation.” Diacritics 48.3 (2021): 10–39.

Making It News in Contemporary Poetry.Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik / International Journal for Comparative Cultural Studies 2 (2021): 249–77.

World Literature in Stereo: Magnetic Tape and the Media Futures of Global Literary History.” “The Postlingual Turn,” special issue of SubStance 50.1 (2021): 27–53.

Teaching without a Text: Close Listening to Kamau Brathwaite's Digital Audio Archive.Archipelagos: A Journal of Caribbean Digital Praxis 5 (2020).

Do Look Down: Surveying the Field from Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4.2 (2019).

Global Rhythms: Setting the Stage for World Poetry in 1960s London.” World Poetics, Comparative Poetics, spec. issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 88.2 (2019): 263–76.

Too Big to Teach? Sizing Up Global Modernism.”  Modernism/modernity Print Plus (2019).

Wong, Lorraine C. M., and Jacob Edmond, “Flipping the Script: An Introduction to Three Essays and to the Problem of Censorship in Chinese Studies,” introductory essay to a thematic group of essays in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 40 (2018).

“The Elephant in the Room: Theory in World Literature.” Literary Studies across Cultures: A Chinese-European Dialogue, spec. issue of Orbis Litterarum (2018). Online version available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/oli.12182.

“Poetry and Translation in Times of Censorship; or, What Cambridge University Press and the Chinese Government Have in Common.” In the Moment, the Critical Inquiry blog, 13 Dec. 2017, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/poetry-and-translation-in-times-of-censorship-or-what-cambridge-university-press-and-the-chinese-government-have-in-common/.

“No Discipline.” Introduction to The Indiscipline of Comparison, spec. issue of Comparative Literature Studies 53.4 (2016): 647–59. (Introductory essay to a special issue I edited––see Edited Books and Special Issues above.)

“The Uses of Postmodernism.” What [in the World] Was Postmodernism?, spec. issue of Electronic Book Review (December 2016).

“Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tretyakov to Prigov.”Slavic Review 75.2 (summer 2016): 299–330.

“Dmitrij Prigov's Iterative Poetics.” Russian Literature 76.3 (2014): 275-308.

“Diffracted Waves and World Literature.”Parallax (July 2014): 245–57.

“Archive of the Now.” Invited contribution to the 2014–2015 Report on the State of the Discipine of Comparative Literature, American Comparative Literature Association.

“Everybody is a Genius: Conceptual Writing and Community.”Jacket2 25 September 2013: .

“The Eclipse of New Zealand Literature.” Landfall 224 (2012): 165–68.

“Dmitrii Prigov i mezhkul'turnyi kontseptualizm.”Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 118 (2012): 218–45.

Edmond, Jacob, and Cilla McQueen. “'Spanners in the Wrong Works': Translating Dmitry Golynko.”Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 11 (2012): 139–54.

“Arkady Dragomoshchenko's Correspondences.”Slavic and East European Journal 55.4 (2011): 525–52.

“'Let's do a Gertrude Stein on it': Caroline Bergvall and Iterative Poetics.” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 3.2 (2011): 109–22.

“The Flâneur in Exile.”Comparative Literature 62.4 (Fall 2010): 376–98.

“The Closures of the Open Text: Lyn Hejinian's 'Paradise Found.'”Contemporary Literature 50.2 (Summer 2009): 240–72.

“Revistas, antologías y clubs: la cultura poética “samizdat” en la década de los setenta y ochenta.” Trans. Carmen Toledano Buendía. Nerter 13–14 (2009): 14–23.

"Bridging Poetic and Cold War Divides in Lyn Hejinian's Oxota and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate." Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 16 (2008): 85-100.

"The Borderline Poetics of Tze Ming Mok." Representing Asia, Remaking Aotearoa, spec. issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10.1 (June 2008): 108–133.

(Co-authored with Olivia Eaton). “Russia in Landfall under Charles Brasch.”New Zealand Slavonic Journal 41 (2007): 180–93.

“No Place like Home: Encounters between New Zealand and Russian Poetries.” Russia, spec. issue of Landfall 213 (2007): 73-80.

“Antologías traspasando fronteras: encuentro y colaboración entre las poéticas de vanguardia de Rusia y los Estados Unidos.” Trans. Matilde Martín González. Nerter 10 (2006-7): 34-40.

"Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement."Poetics Today 27.1 (2006). 97-124.

"Dissidence and Accommodation: The Publishing History of Yang Lian from Today to Today."The China Quarterly 185 (2006) 111-27.

"From Pathos to Parody: Ambivalent Antithesis and Echoes of 'Vychožu odin ja na dorogu' in 'Obraz tvoj mučitel'nyj i zybkij' and 'Zolotoj' from Osip Mandel'štam's Kamen'." Russian Literature 58.3-4 (2005): 357-373.

"Beyond Binaries: Rereading Yang Lian's 'Norlang' and 'Banpo.'"Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 6.1 (2005): 152-69.

"Locating Global Resistance: The Landscape Poetics of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Lyn Hejinian and Yang Lian."AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language & Literature Association 101 (2004): 71-98.

"The I as Such: Vladimir Maiakovskii's Ia!"Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 16.1-2 (2002): 41-54.

"'A Meaning Alliance': Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Lyn Hejinian's Poetics of Translation." Slavic and East European Journal 46.3 (2002 [2003]): 551-63.

"Re-visioning the I/Eye: Lyn Hejinian's Poetics of Translation." How 2: Contemporary Innovative Writing by Women 7 (2002). Scholarly Communication Center. Rutgers University.

"Drawing Conclusions on Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin and 'Stantsionnyi smotritel'' from Povesti Belkina."New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1999): 51-61.

Opinion pieces and scholarly commentaries

“Clarity from the Confusing Swirl of China.” Newsroom 27 December 2022.

"Facing up to the Reality of Our Colonialist, Racist Past." Stuff 16 July 2022.

"'Today Is Not My Day': How Russia's Journalists, Writers and Artists Are Turning Silence into Speech." The Conversation 20 June 2022.

"'I Can't Breathe' a Marker of Our Times." Newsroom 16 May 2021.

(with Huda Fakhreddine, Amber Rose Johnson, and Al Filreis). Recorded discussion of Kamau Brathwaite's poem "Negus." PoemTalk, U of Pennsylvania. Recorded 20 Nov. 2019. Released 23 June 2020.

"Going Viral: When Art Imitates Life." Newsroom 18 March 2020.

"Poetry—But Not as You Know It." Newsroom 21 Nov. 2019.

“Sounding Out the Archive: Listening to the Caribbean Artists Movement's Bilingual Performance of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.”University of Toronto Press Journals Blog, 26 August 2019.

"We must speak out on AUT, China and Threats to Academic Freedom." The Spinoff 3 Aug. 2019.

"Versing." Contribution to a forum (also including Bob Perelman, Brian Reed, and Amy Catanzano) on "What Is at Stake in/when Defining Poetry." Ed. Katie L. Price. Jacket2 5 Jan. 2015.

"Iterations." Invited series of commentaries for Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania). Sep. 2012-Mar. 2013.

Chapters and entries

“A Haunted Taste.” Encountering China: New Zealanders and the People's Republic. Edited by Duncan Campbell and Brian Moloughney. Massey University Press, 2022. 96–103.

Dissent and Its Discontents in Cold War Poetry.” The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Ed. Andrew Hammond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 367–86.

Translating Theory: Bei Dao, Pasternak, and Russian Formalism.”    Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs. Ed. Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2019. 135–57.

Modernist Waves: Yang Lian, John Cayley, and the Location of Global Modernism in the Digital Age.Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Ed. Christopher Lupke and Paul Manfredi. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 283–303.

“Russian Lessons for Conceptual Writing.” Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art. Ed. Andrea Andersson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2018. 316–34.

“On Not Repeating Gone with the Wind: Iteration and Copyright.” Critical Creative Writing: An Anthology of Craft-Criticism. Ed. Janelle Adsit. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. 174–75.

“Archive of the Now.” Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report. Ed. Ursula Heise et al. London: Routledge, 2017. 239–47.

“Copy.” A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism. Ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. 96–113.

“Inverted Islands: Sinophone New Zealand Literature.” Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. Ed. Shu-mei Shih, Tsai Chien-hsin, and Brian Bernards. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. 339–52.

“Araki Yasusada and Conceptual Writing: Global Paranoia and Local Belatedness.” Chrysanthemums and Scuba Divers: Essays on Araki Yasusada. Ed. Bill Freind. Exeter: Shearsman, 2012. 209–23.

“Dislocated Location and Impersonal Autobiography: Yang Lian and the Object of Contemporary Chinese Poetry.” Re-centring Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities. Ed. Jacob Edmond, Henry Johnson, and Jacqueline Leckie. Leiden: Brill / Global Oriental, 2011. 113–29.

“Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.” Russian Poets of the Soviet Era. Ed. Karen Rosneck. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 359. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 89–98.

"A Poetics of Translocation: Yang Lian's Auckland and Lyn Hejinian's Leningrad."Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age. Ed. Chris Prentice, Vijay Devadas, and Henry Johnson. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2010. 105-34. For more on the book in which my essay appears, see Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age. I am very grateful to Rodopi for permission to post my chapter here.

Edmond, Jacob, and Hilary Chung. “Yang Lian, Auckland, and the Poetics of Exile.” Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland. By Yang Lian. Auckland: Auckland UP, 2006. 1–23.

"American Language Poetry and the Definition of the Avant-Garde."Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2005. 173-194.

"East European Poetry." Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. 446-51.

Introduction. Chinese Sun. By Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Trans. Evgeny Pavlov. New York: Ugly Duckling, 2005. vii-xvi.

Reviews and review articles

Review of News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945, by Rachel Galvin. Modernism/Modernity 27.4 (2020): 867–70.

Review of Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics, by Tong King Lee. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (July 2019)

Review of Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, by Sara Pankenier Weld. Slavic Review 75.1 (Spring 2016): 214–15.

Review of Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money, by Maghiel van Crevel. China Quarterly 207 (Sept. 2011): 741-743. Online at Cambridge University Press' China Quarterly. Copyright The China Quarterly 2011.

“Not So Hopped-Up.” Rev. of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, ed. Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 164–73.

Rev. of East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination. Edited by Charles Ferrall, Paul Millar and Keren Smith. The China Quarterly 187 (2006): 812-3.

Rev. of Zemlia morei: Antologiia poezii Novoi Zelandii [A Land of Seas: An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry]. Ed. and intro. Mark Williams. Landfall 210 (Nov. 2005): 161-4.

Rev. of Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Ed. Romana Huk. National Identities 8.2 (2006): 185-7.

"Finding Holes in the Whole." Rev. of The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. By Brian McHale. Electronic Book Review (Sep. 2006)

"Disappearing Acts" Rev. of Star Dust. By Frank Bidart. Boston Review. Sep.-Oct. 2005. 60-1.

Rev. of Wave and Stone: Essays on the Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pushkin. By J. Douglas Clayton. New Zealand Slavonic Journal (2001): 274-6.

Translations and other creative work

trans. “Everything Was in Decline.” Endarkenment. By Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Ed. Eugene Ostashevsky. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. 87–95.

trans. “Stoke Newington Scene.” Lee Valley Poems. By Yang Lian. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009. 33.

O'Brien,Gregory, and Jacob Edmond, trans. Three Poems. By Olga Sedakova, Russia, spec. issue of Landfall 213 (2007). 12-18.

Edmond, Jacob, and Evgeny Pavlov, trans. From Distribution. By Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Russia, spec. issue of Landfall 213 (2007). 19-20.

Edmond, Jacob, and Evgeny Pavlov, trans. “Lower Lip Piercing.” By Aleksandr Skidan. Russia, spec. issue of Landfall 213 (2007): 29–39. Rpt. in Red Shifting. By Aleksandr Skidan. New York: Ugly Duckling, 2008. 107–131.

McQueen, Cilla, and Jacob Edmond, trans.Two Poems. By Dmitry Golynko. Russia, spec. issue of Landfall 213 (2007): 45-51.

Yang Lian, Jacob Edmond, and Tze Ming Mok. “Whispers.” Borderline spec. issue of Landfall 211 (2006): 64-72.

“Invocation of Bluffers.” [After Velimir Khlebnikov.] Oban 06 Online Poetry Anthology. NZEPC.

trans. "12 Storkwinkel, Berlin." By Yang Lian. Jacket 16 (2002).

trans. “Moonlit Night in the Sky (from the 'Lee Valley Poems').” By Yang Lian. Octopus 3 (2004). Web. Rpt. in Lee Valley Poems. By Yang Lian. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009. 39.

Edmond, Murray and Jacob Edmond, trans. “Spring, Teresa.” By Jan Neruda. E-mailing Venus: Translations of Poets from Sappho Onwards. Ed. Diana Harris, and Anna Jackson. Auckland: n.p., 1998. N.p. [10].

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