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About Dr Jacob McGuinn

Jacob is Assistant Professor in English at the Northeastern University London, having also taught literature at Goldsmiths, University of London and Queen Mary, University of London, and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King’s College London. He received his PhD in English at Queen Mary in 2017, working on modern poetry, poetics, and aesthetic philosophy. His teaching and research cover issues in modernity, poetry and poetics, and philosophical aesthetics, ranging from the Romantic era to the contemporary.

Contact: jacob.mcguinn@nchlondon.ac.uk

Qualifications

PhD English, Queen Mary, University of London 2017 (AHRC funded)

MA Literary Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London 2011

BA English and History (Joint hons.), University of Birmingham 2010

Dr Jacob McGuinn's Research

Jacob’s research investigates connections between literature, criticism, and history, drawing on philosophical, historical, and political contexts to read modern poetry. His first monograph reads Paul Celan’s late poetry in this manner, situating his work from late 1960s Paris in a constellation of thinkers on the question of form in philosophy and literature: Immanuel Kant, Theodor Adorno, and Maurice Blanchot. Further work on these issues has read Blanchot’s post-Kantianism through Wordsworth; George Oppen’s politics of ‘common sense’; and Celan as a figure of elegy and as a reader of the cinema. This research is interested in tracing modernity’s developing theories of criticism, interpretation, and reading through poetry, and in particular in understanding the conditions of reading and criticism.

Jacob’s current research is in two parts, working between Romantic and contemporary modernities. Firstly, as part of the AHRC ‘Radical Translations’ project (KCL), he works on translation in the European revolutionary period around 1800. Secondly, his research considers the roots of contemporary intermedial poetics in modern experimental poetry traditions, touching on visual art, the moving image, and sound as contexts for both writing and reading poetry.

Publications

Jacob McGuinn (2022), ‘Elegy, form, and the inorganic: Geoffrey Hill, Paul Celan, Ice’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 68: 4 (December 2022), pp. 389-410

Jacob McGuinn (2023), ‘Paul Celan’, in Hannes Opelz & Michael Holland eds., Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2023) Forthcoming

Jacob McGuinn (2023), ‘Theodor Adorno’, in Hannes Opelz & Michael Holland eds., Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2023) Forthcoming

Jacob McGuinn (2022), ‘Lydia Davis / Maurice Blanchot, invisible’, Post45: Contemporaries, July, https://post45.org/2022/06/lydia-davis-maurice-blanchot-invisible/

Jacob McGuinn (2021), ”Into without image’: Paul Celan reading the moving image’, Modern Language Notes: Comparative Literature Issue, 136: 5, pp. 1237-1260

Jacob McGuinn (2020), ‘Saying ‘we’: George Oppen’s and Kant’s lyrical ‘common sense”, Textual Practice, 34: 10, pp. 1751-1768 (first published online 27 June 2019)

Jacob McGuinn (2017), ‘A Review of Kevin Hart’s Poetry and Revelation’, Phenomenological Reviews

In preparation

Jacob McGuinn, Reading at the limits of poetic form: Emerging immateriality in Adorno, Blanchot, Celan (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023)

Jacob McGuinn, Rosa Mucignat, Sanja Perovic and Nigel Ritchie eds., ‘Radical Voices: Revolutionary Discourses of Translation, 1782-1815’

Dr Jacob McGuinn's Teaching

Jacob has taught literature and philosophy at BA and MA levels in a number of institutions, in aesthetics, poetry, critical theory, and comparative literature.

At Northeastern University London, he has taught on Cultures of London, Criticism, and North American Literature.