I write and research about modern literature and culture. I’m especially interested in the ways in which modernist literature circulated within different social landscapes. Accordingly, my first book, Transatlantic Modernism and the U.S. Lecture Tour (Oxford UP, 2021), examines how the US lecture tour served as a vital infrastructure for distributing international modernism to regional audiences throughout America.
My other research interests lie in the field of disability studies, and I’m currently working on a new book project that considers how bad eyesight has been crucial for generating the aesthetic forms–abstraction, fragmentation, and the rejection of verisimilitude more broadly–we typically associate with modern art and literature. For example, I’ve recently written a public-facing essay about Claude Monet’s cataracts. I’ve also published a journal article about low vision in the novels of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce. In the larger project, I treat the literary writings of George Gould, Ezra Pound’s eye doctor; the opacity Djuna Barnes infuses into both her visual art and writing; and the connections between race and visual impairment in the work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
In recent years, I’ve also become interested in fin-de-siècle decadence and the afterlife of decadent aesthetics in the early twentieth century. For instance, my recent essay in PMLA, “Countee Cullen’s Harlem Decadence,” takes Countee Cullen’s critical reputation as an out-of-date poet as an opportunity to reassess his Harlem Renaissance poetry under the sign of decadence.
Selected Recent Publications
“Early Responses and Criticism (1910–1930),” The Oxford Handbook of Gertrude Stein, ed. Emily Setina, Katharine Boswell, and Lisa Siraganian, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
“Troubled Images: Disability and Vision in Modernist American Poetry” for The Oxford History of Poetry in English, Volume 11: American Poetry: 1865–1939, ed. Nadia Nurhussein, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
“The Opacity of Djuna Barnes,” forthcoming in Modernism/modernity (33.3 (September 2026).
“Recycling Modernism in the Pacific Islands: An Interview with Craig Santos Perez,” ASAP/Review (December 2025).
Review of Hannah Freed-Thall, Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia UP, 2023), Modern Fiction Studies 70.4 (Winter 2024): 754–756.
Guest Editor, essay cluster on “Disability on the Cusp,” Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures 2.2 (Summer 2024).
“The Poet’s Room as Archive,” Marianne Moore and the Archives: From Material Culture to the Digital Humanities, ed. Jeffrey Westover, ed. Jeffrey Westover, Clemson University Press & Liverpool University Press, 2024: 43–58.
“Countee Cullen’s Harlem Decadence,” PMLA 138.5 (October 2023): 1078-1093.
Click here for a full CV.
ROBERT VOLPICELLI 