Nathan Brown, PhD

Professor, English
Director, Centre for Expanded Poetics, English

Research areas: Poetry and Poetics; Modern Philosophy and Critical Theory; Modernism

Contact information

Email:

nathan.brown@concordia.ca

Availability:

Office, LB 674-06 (or LB 681, Centre for Expanded Poetics)

Website:

Centre for Expanded Poetics

Biography

Note to Prospective Graduate Students
I have no interest in working with graduate students who use AI in their writing and research. If you get in touch to discuss potential supervision and I discern that parts of your email or other materials are AI generated or edited, I will decline to work with you. If you choose to carry out graduate studies under my supervision and I discern that you are making use of AI in any aspect of your research or writing, I will cease to work with you. So, please only contact me as a potential supervisor if you plan to conduct your academic work in an ethical manner: without the assistance of AI.

Research Profile
I received my Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008, before beginning my career at UC Davis as Assistant Professor of English. At Concordia, I was Canada Research Chair in Poetics from 2015-2025 and am founding Director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. My research moves between literature, philosophy, and the arts, with particular focus on comparative approaches to modern poetry and poetics.

My current book project, The Irony of Ground: Studies in the Poetics of Romantic Modernity, is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2025-2030). Setting out from the suturing of literature, philosophy, and the arts theorized by the Jena Romantics under the concept of romantische Poesie, chapters work through case studies in poetry, fiction, music, architecture, painting, and cinema to situate the enduring importance of romanticism as the interdisciplinary interrogation of contradictions attendant upon the positing of subjective, epistemological, artistic, and political foundations.

My most recent book, Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination, argues that what is most fundamentally at stake across the manifold layers of Baudelaire’s poetic project is a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency bound up with its negation. This approach enables a new understanding of conceptual, formal, and figural cruxes traversing The Flowers of Evil, including the relationship between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the representation of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the singularity of the aesthetic, the actuality of the social, the indeterminacy of sense, and the materiality of the signifier. My complete translation of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal was published by Verso in 2025.

My 2021 book, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique, was awarded Honorable Mention for the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Tracing a dialectic of reason and experience through ancient, modern, and contemporary thought, the book argues that the misleading opposition of speculative and critical approaches to philosophy can be overcome by rethinking the methodological relationship between rationalism and empiricism.

My 2017 book, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics,

asks how experiments in the making of poetic forms arerelated to scientific approaches to constructing new materials. Exploring the relevance of fields crucial to materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesicdesign) to the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, andRonald Johnson, the book traces this relationship back to Charles Olson’s“objectist” poetics, carving out a tradition of constructivist,non-organic poetry that has developed in conversation with science andengineering.

With Michael Nardone, I edit the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics, DOCUMENTS. With Petar Milat, I have organized an ongoing series of international conferences in Zagreb since 2009, titled Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics. These events have resulted in two edited volumes, The Art of the Concept (2013) and Poiesis (2017).

Education

PhD, University of California at Los Angeles (2008)
MA, Queen's University (2002)
BAH, Queen's University (2001)

Fields of Research and Teaching

Poetry and Poetics
Modern Philosophy and Critical Theory
Modernism

Teaching Activities

Graduate Courses

Image & Object: The Metaphysics of Free Verse
Introduction to Theories and Methods
The Tragic Universe
Early German Romanticism and the Genesis of Theory
The Poetics of the Untimely: From Negritude to the Haitian Revolution
21st Century Poetry and Poetics
Poetic Determination: Form and Mediation in Les Fleurs du mal
Aesthetic Theory: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary
Modernist Architecture, Capitalist Planning, and Poetic Critique: Remaking Place Ville-Marie
Blackness, Freedom, Free Verse
Structure / Form
Expanded Poetics

Recent non-credit philosophy seminars

Spinoza, Ethics
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1

Heidegger, Being and Time

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Lacan, Seminar - Book III
Social Death and Afro-Pessimism: Patterson, Hartman, Wilderson

Publications

Books
Baudelaire's Shadow: On Poetic Determination (Fordham, 2026) LINK

Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham, 2021) LINK

The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, 2017) LINK

The Flowers of Evil, translation of Les Fleurs du mal (Verso, 2025) LINK

Poiesis, Ed. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (MaMa, 2017) PDF

Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Elemental History: Zumthor after Hölderlin,” boundary2 online, 8.1 (May 2026). Link

"Alas, poor Yorick!...The Being of Spirit is a Bone," Problemi International 6 (2023): 51-73. PDF

"The Flowers of Andromache: Allegory, Ontology, and Tragedy in Baudelaire's 'Le Cygne'," Crisis & Critique 10.2 (2023): 56-80. PDF

"Césaire's Claim: On the Retroactive Genesis of Free Verse," Crisis & Critique 9.2 (2022): 112-136. PDF

"Postmodernity, Not Yet: Toward a New Periodization," Radical Philosophy 2.01 (February 2018): 11-27. PDF Link

"More Beautiful, More Intense? H.D.'s Poetics of Comparison" in Poiesis, Ed. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (MaMa, 2017). PDF

"The Irony of Anatomy: Basquiat's Poetics of Black Positionality," Radical Philosophy 195 (Jan/Feb 2016): 11-24. PDF

"The Proletariat," Transcripts 3 (2013). PDF

"Red Years: Althusser's Lesson, Rancière's Error, and the Real Movement of History," Radical Philosophy 170 (Nov/Dec 2011). PDF