Rate My Professor Jacob Edmond

Professor Jacob Edmond serves as the Donald Collie Professor of English in the Department of English and Linguistics, School of Arts, Division of Humanities, at the University of Otago. He earned his BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Auckland and holds Te Pīnakitanga ki te Reo Kairangi from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Edmond joined the University of Otago in 2004 as an assistant lecturer, progressed through the academic ranks, and was promoted to full professor in 2020. He was recently appointed to the Donald Collie Chair, one of the oldest positions at the university established at its founding, and stands as the longest-serving professor in the English and Linguistics programme. Over his two decades at Otago, he has taught English papers across all levels and supervised numerous PhD students to completion.

Edmond specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry in English, Chinese, and Russian, alongside modernism and postmodernism, the avant-garde, literary theory, literature and politics, comparative and world literature, and literature and media. His research investigates literary and artistic responses to changes in media, culture, economics, and geopolitics, such as poets from China, Russia, and the United States addressing Cold War disruptions and globalization via copying and repetition. He currently directs the Marsden Fund project 'Technologies of World Literature: News of the World: The Global Poetics of the Newspaper' and is finishing a book on news media engagements from newspapers to social media. Major publications include the monographs Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press, 2012), recipient of an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and runner-up for the 2013 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. He has edited volumes like Recentring Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities (Brill/Global Oriental, 2011) and special issues of Comparative Literature Studies (2016) and Affirmations of the Modern (2024), with articles in Diacritics, SubStance, Slavic Review, Prism, and Chinese Literature and Thought Today. In 2021, he presented his Inaugural Professorial Lecture at the University of Otago.