Nathan Brown, PhD
- Professor, English
- Director, Centre for Expanded Poetics, English
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Sign in to editResearch areas: Poetry and Poetics; Modern Philosophy and Critical Theory; Modernism
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Biography
Professor of English
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 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, studies concepts and ideologies of structure and form traversing practices of material construction in science and experimental poetry. Reviews have appeared in Boundary2 Online, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere.
My translation of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal was published by Verso in 2025. My critical study, Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination, was published by Fordham University Press in 2026. Moving through chapters on death, the void, the actuality of the social, and the materiality of the signifier, Baudelaire's Shadow theorizes a dialectic of determination — of agency bound up with its negation — at the heart of The Flowers of Evil.
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
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
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1
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
The Flowers of Evil, translation of Les Fleurs du mal (Verso, 2025) LINK
Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham, 2021) LINK
The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, 2017) 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