Job description

Justin Parks has been an associate professor (førsteamanuensis) in American literature and cultural studies at the University of Tromsø-the Arctic University of Norway since 2016. His research and teaching are rooted in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics and American studies, and he also has strong interests in Marxist theory, media (including visual and sound) studies, and environmental/energy humanities. Most recently, he has taught courses on Anglophone modernism and postmodernism, the literature of the 1930s, poetry and poetics, and William Faulkner.

His first monograph, titled Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His current research extends his interest in reading literary and cultural forms in the context of ongoing crises within modernity to address issues of energy and environment: He guest-edited a special issue of the journal Textual Practice (2021) on literature and extractivism, and an essay on John Ashbery’s "energy poetics" is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. He is currently beginning work on a second monograph that examines literature’s relationship to the normalization of fossil fuel consumption in shaping American notions of space in the long twentieth century.