Gillian White

Gillian White is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, where she contributes to teaching and research in Literature. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005 and is listed among the PhD Faculty. White's research specializations and academic interests include Modernism, Poetry and Poetics, Twentieth Century American literature, Theory, Twentieth Century British literature, American literature, English, and British literature. She co-directs the Poetry & Poetics Workshop, a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop established in 2007 alongside Professor Benjamin Paloff from Slavic and Comparative Literature. This forum provides an interdisciplinary space for professors and graduate students across languages and disciplines to share works-in-progress on poetry, poetics, and lyric theory, as well as to host visiting scholars for papers, panels, and discussions.

White authored the book Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry, published by Harvard University Press in 2014. Her key publications also encompass "Poetics of Contingency" (2020), "Reality in America: Realism and Rhetoric in Stevens' 'The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words'" (2011), "Readerly Contingency in Bishop's Journals and Early Prose" (2009), "Words in Air and 'Space' in Art: Bishop’s Midcentury Critique of the United States", "'We do not say ourselves like that in poems': The poetics of contingency in Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop" (2005), "Lyric Poetry" (2021), and "Now can you see the monument? Some notes on reading for 'form'" (2020). Additionally, she has contributed essays to leading publications, including "A Month In the Life" (New York Review of Books, 2021), "Why Feel Bad About Beauty?" (Poetry Foundation, 2021), "Awful But Cheerful" (London Review of Books, 2006), and "Stand-Up Vampire" (London Review of Books, 2013). In recognition of her teaching excellence, White received the 2014 English Department Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her office is at 3243 Angell Hall.

Professional Email: gcwhite@umich.edu