Bio

On leave Spring 2026

I specialize in transatlantic literatures from the eighteenth century to the present with a focus on technology, media, science, and culture. My recent publications have included studies of John Rollin Ridge (Cheesquatalawny or Yellow Bird), Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Charles Williams. My current book project, The Sound Era: Poetry’s Machinery in the Long Nineteenth Century (under contract with Princeton University Press), addresses the relationships between sound technology (stethoscopes, telegraphs, phonographs, telephones, microphones, wireless, etc.) and the poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, the Brontës, the Brownings, John Clare, William Cowper, Sarah Josepha Hale, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and many more.

I teach on topics including interdisciplinary and transnational studies; poetry and poetics; sound studies; early film; digital humanities; gender and sexuality; race studies; medical humanities and disability studies; archive, book, and periodical studies.

I’ve published work in Public Books, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, Review of English Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, Oxford University Press Blog, and others. I’ve appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show, and in The New York Times.

For more information, please go to www.justintackett.org.