Contact Information

Biography

Linda Kinnahan is Professor of English at Â鶹ֱ²¥ in Pittsburgh. She is editor of the Cambridge History of 20th Century American Women's Poetry, and author of 2 forthcoming monographs, Mina Loy, Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets and Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore (both from Routledge). She has published on modernist and contemporary poetry, including Poetics of the Feminine: Literary Tradition and Authority in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge UP 1994) and Lyric Interventions: Feminist Experimental Poetry and Contemporary Social Discourse (Iowa UP 2004). Her essays appear in journals that include Contemporary Women Writers, Contemporary Literature, Sagetrieb, and Poetry Review (UK), and in collections from Cambridge UP, Iowa UP, Blackwell, Edinburgh UP, Wesleyan Up, and Oxford UP. She is co-author of the digital humanities project "Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde," and she has been a lead organizer for international conferences on Modernism (MSA, 2014) and on modern and contemporary women's poetry (Lifting Belly, 2008).

Education

Ph.D., English, University of Notre Dame, 1991
M.A., English, James Madison University, 1986
B.S., Art & English, James Madison University, 1978

My courses focus on twentieth century literature, women's and gender studies, and poetics and poetry. My teaching interests cross boundaries of American and British literature, extending across the century and including genres of poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, and visual media (especially visual art and photography).

Recent graduate courses include:
• Modernism and Visual Culture (intersections of modernist writing and visual cultures of fine art, photography, film, architecture, domestic art, and popular media)
• Modernist American Poetry (poetics and poetry of the modernist era)
• Modernism and the Feminist Context (placing modernist writing in relation to socio-historical contexts of First-Wave Feminism)
• Economics and Modernist Literature (interdisciplinary connections between modernist writing and economic theories and practices shaping early consumer capitalism in America and Britain)
• Twentieth-and Twenty-first-Century American Women Poets
• Contemporary American Poetry (post-World War II, from the Beats to the present)
• Contemporary British & Irish Poetry (late modernist "experimental"; postcolonial and "Black British"; various schools and national formations of poetry to emerge since 1950)
• Feminist Theory & Criticism (an introduction to contemporary feminist theory)

Books: 

Lyric Interventions:Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse.  Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2004.

Poetics of the Feminine:Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Mina Loy, Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets. Routledge, Spring 2017.

Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, & Marianne Moore (Routledge, forthcoming)

Editor, A Cambridge History of 20th-Century American Women Poets. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Journal Articles or Essays in Books

"Adrienne Rich's Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law: The Postwar Photo and Feminist Reframing." Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero: Voice, Vision, Politics and Performance in U.S. Contemporary Women's Poetry. Ed. Laura Hinton. New York: Little and Rowman (2016)

"The Category of ‘Woman Poet'." The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry. Ed. Linda A. Kinnahan. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. (2016)."

Feminist Poetics: First-Wave Feminism, Theory, and Modernist Women Poets" Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Ed. Robin Truth Goodman. London and New York: Cambridge UP (2015): 54-68.

"Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore."The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. London and New York: Oxford University Press. (2011) 

"British Experimentation and Women: Interview with Caroline Bergvall." Contemporary Women's Writing 5.3 (Fall 2011): 1-29.

"Postmodernism and the Language of Poetry: Feminism's Experimental 'work at the language-face'." The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women's Poetry. Ed. Jane Dowson. Cambridge University Press, 2011: 254-279.

"The Internationalized Midwest in the Poetry of John Matthias." The Salt Companion to John Matthias. Ed. Joe Francis Doerr. London: Salt Publishing, 2011: 44-63.  

 "An Incremental Shaping: Kathleen Fraser and a Visual Poetics in Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling." Contemporary Women's Writing 4.1 (March 2010): 1-23.

"Lyric, Self, and Subjectivity in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry by Women." A Concise Companion to Post-War British and Irish Poetry. Eds. Charles Blanton and Nigel Alderman. Wiley-Blackwell  Publishing, 2009. 176-199.

"Modernist Moments, Feminist Mappings." The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English. Eds. Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson. Edinburgh University Press, July 2006: 23-34.

 "Introduction: American Women Poets of the Fifties." Sagetrieb: Poetry and Poetics After Modernism 19.3 (Fall 2006), Special Issue: Women Poets of the Fifties: 3-10.

 "Feminist Experimental Poetics in America and England." Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk. New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 2003: 275-283.

"Bodies Written Off: Economies of Race and Gender in the Visual/Verbal Collaborative Clash of Erica Hunt and Alison Saar's Arcade."  "We Who Love to Be Astonished:  Experimental Feminist Poetics and Performance Art, eds. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series, 2002: 165-180. 

"Denise Riley's Lyric Innovation." Poetry Review (England), 2002.

"A Peculiar Hybrid: The Feminist Project of HOW(ever)."  HOW2 1.5 (March 2001). 

"Reading Barbara Guest."  The Scene of Our Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets, eds. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2001: 229-244.

"Now I am Alien: Immigration and the Discourse of Nation in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy." Contemporary Women's Poetry:  Reading/ Writing/ Practice, eds. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones. London: Macmillan, 2000: 208-225.

"Experimental Poetics and the Lyric in British Women's Poetry: Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, and Denise Riley."  Contemporary Literature 37.4 (Winter 1996): 620-670.

"'Look for the doing words': Carol Ann Duffy and Questions of Convention. Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Theory, eds. James Acheson and Romana Huk. Buffalo: SUNY UP, 1996: 245-268. 

"History and the Textual Process: 'To discover woman' in William Carlos Williams' Prose and Early Poetry." William Carlos Williams Review 20.2 (Fall 1994): 30-51.

 "'A Seizure of Voice': Language Innovation and a Feminist Poetics in the Works of Kathleen Fraser."  Contemporary Literature 33.2 (Summer 1992): 337-372. (appears under the name of Linda A. Taylor)

 "Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams: Lines of Contact."  William Carlos Williams Review 16.2 (Fall 1990): 26-47. (appears under the name of Linda A. Taylor) 

Digital Humanities Project

"Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde." Multimedia scholarly website,
co-authored by Suzanne Churchill (Professor of English, Davidson College); Andrew Rikard (Davidson College class of 2017), Susan
Rosenbaum (Assoc. Prof. of English, Univ. of Georgia), Linda Kinnahan
(Prof. of English, Duquesne Univ.).

Conference Organization

Host Organizer, Sixteenth Conference of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA16), Pittsburgh PA., November 2014

Co-organizer, Lifting Belly High: Women's Poetry Since 1900, September 2008, Duquesne University

Recently, I have completed editing the 23-chapter Cambridge History of 20th-Century American Women Poets. Additionally, Mina Loy, Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets, a monograph on the poet Mina Loy and cultures of photography that emerged within modernist avant-garde and popular venues, is forthcoming this year. I am currently completing a book-length study of economics and modernist women poets, Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, & Marianne Moore (Routledge, forthcoming).

Ongoing research on Marianne Moore and Lola Ridge will also appear over the next year in article form. With colleagues from Davidson College (Suzanne Churchill) and the University of Georgia (Susan Rosenbaum), I am co-authoring a digital scholarly website focused on Mina Loy. I regularly present scholarly papers on modernist and contemporary poetry at the yearly Modernist Studies Association conference and other conference venues.

Associate Editor, POETRY, Journal of Contemporary Writing by Women (Oxford UP)

Editorial Advisory Board, HOW(2), how2journal, HOW(2) is an on-line journal devoted to women's innovative writing, composed of critical articles and creative work. 

Advisory Board, University of Iowa Series on North American Poetry

Advisory Editor, Journal of Modern Literature (2014-present)