Jeff Dolven

Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He offers undergraduate courses including Poetry and the Arts, the Humanities Sequence, lectures on Shakespeare and early English literature, and seminars on Edmund Spenser's poetry, the theory and praxis of the human voice, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, and poetry and belief through Princeton's Prison Teaching Initiative at East Jersey State Prison. His graduate seminars cover Shakespeare's language, sixteenth-century lyric, Renaissance romance, and collaborative topics such as Critique and Its Discontents, Style and Rule, Experience, The Poetics of History, and New Schools. Dolven earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University in 1990, a BA in English from Oxford University in 1993 as a Rhodes Scholar, and a PhD in English from Yale University in 2000. His career began as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University from 2000 to 2001. At Princeton, he advanced from Assistant Professor (2001-2007) to Associate Professor (2007-2016) and Professor of English since 2016, holding the Donald A. Stauffer Bicentennial Preceptorship (2004-2007) and serving as Behrman Professor of the Humanities from 2016 to 2019.

Dolven was founding director of Princeton's Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) from 2011 to 2015, acting chair of the English Department in 2018-2019 and 2022-2023, and is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His books of criticism include Scenes of Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received the Isabel MacCaffrey Prize of the International Spenser Society and the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award; Senses of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Take Care (Cabinet Books, 2017). Poetry volumes are Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings, 2022). Scholarly articles appear in journals such as Studies in English Literature, Representations, English Language Notes, Chicago Review, and Southwest Review, addressing Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare's reading, and more. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, and others. Notable awards include Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows (1996-2000), Mellon/ACLS Fellowship for Junior Faculty (2003-2004), Guggenheim Fellowship (2015-2016), and fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, American Philosophical Society, and MacDowell Colony.

Professional Email: jdolven@princeton.edu