Rate My Professor David Ruderman

David Ruderman is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University’s Newark campus, specializing in Literature with a focus on nineteenth-century British poetry and poetics. He earned his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in 2008, defending a dissertation titled “‘Breathing Space’: Infancy and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and Poetics,” under the chairship of Marjorie Levinson. Ruderman received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, graduating with highest honors and winning the senior thesis award in English. His research interests include psychoanalysis, music, twentieth-century American poetry, and aesthetic theory. Ruderman’s scholarship examines Romanticism, subjectivity, form, ballad poetics, and intersections between poetry, political geography, and psychoanalytic discourse in works by poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Frost, and Shelley.

Ruderman is the author of the monograph The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (Routledge, 2016). Selected publications include “Robert Frost’s Ambivalence: Borders and Boundaries in Poetic and Political Discourse,” co-authored with Ken Madsen (Political Geography 55, 2016), “The Breathing Space of Ballad: Tennyson’s Stillborn Poetics” (Victorian Poetry 47.1, 2009), “Romantic Objects in Coleridge and Erasmus Darwin” (Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 16, 2008), and the chapter “Reforming the Child: Infancy and the Reception of Wordsworth’s Ode” in Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). He has earned awards including co-winner of the NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Course Contest (2013), Fellow with the American Psychoanalytic Association (2008/09), Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship (University of Michigan, 2006-2007), Mezger Prize for best graduate student essay from the International Conference on Romanticism (2007), and Rackham One-term Fellowship (2008). Ruderman has presented widely at conferences including NASSR, International Conference on Romanticism, Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and Coleridge Summer Conference. At Ohio State, he teaches courses on British literature from 1800, Romantic repetitions, monstrosity and humanism, and creative writing; leads the community poetry workshop “Writing and Rewriting the Self” for individuals in recovery from addiction; participates in the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project; and was selected for the 2024-25 Society of Fellows Faculty Cohort.