Jennifer Chang

Jennifer Chang

Title:
Assistant Professor of English
Office:
Room 612
Address: Phillips Hall
Email:
jtchang@gwu.edu

Areas of Expertise

Creative Writing (Poetry and Creative Non-Fiction); Poetry and Poetics; Twentieth Century Literature, especially Anglophone and American Modernism; and Transnational Studies 

Professor of English

Current Research

Professor Chang is a poet and scholar. Her recent poems investigate the intersections of nature, culture, and gender history and, more generally, aim to find language for odd feelings. Her areas of scholarly interest include the history of poetry and poetics, race and space, Modernism, Pastoral Studies, and Asian American Studies. Her dissertation-in-progress uncovers how modernist American writers used the pastoral mode to interrogate social and racial exclusions while re-imagining American cultural identities and social spaces for the twentieth century.

Education

PhD, University of Virginia, expected in 2016

MFA, University of Virginia, 2002

BA, University of Chicago, 1998

Publications

Books

Some Say the Lark (forthcoming: Alice James Books 2017) 

The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press 2008)

 

Selected Poems in Journals and Anthologies

"Lost Child," Boston Review (forthcoming)

"About Trees (envoi)," Orion (forthcoming)

“It Was Your Birthday Today,” A Public Space (forthcoming)

“A Horse Named Never,” Poetry (October 2015)

“Patsy Cline,” Poem-A-Day (August 11, 2015)

“Mount Pleasant” and “Signs,” The American Poetry Review (July/August 2015)

 “The World,” New England Review (Winter 2015)

 “Whoso List to Hunt,” “There Are Too Many Other Birds,” Salt Hill (Winter/Spring 2015)

“Obedience, or a Lying Tale,” Please Excuse This Poem (Vintage, 2014)

“Dorothy Wordsworth” Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribners, 2012)

“The Strangers,” The Rumpus (April 2012)

“Habit,” WebConjunctions (2010)

“River Pilgrims,” Kenyon Review (Spring 2008)

“This Corner of the Western World,” The New Republic (February 19, 2007)

 

Essays in Journals and Anthologies

“On Writing ‘A Horse Named Never,’” Poetry Foundation blog (October 2015)

“Statement of Purpose,” The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, eds. Claudia Rankine, Max Cap King, and Beth Loffreda (Fence Books, 2015)

 “The Public Life of Poetry: A Conversation with Natasha Trethewey,” Los Angeles Review of Books (June 2013)

“On Forgetting and Other Natural Erasures,” The Volta (April 2013)

“How to Read a Prophecy,” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2012)

 

Scholarly Publications

“Pastoral and the Problem of Place in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows,” Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Blackwell, 2015)

Entries on chain rhyme, grammatical rhyme, and internal rhyme in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetic, eds. Stephen Cushman and Roland Greene (Princeton University Press, 2012)