Bilde av Parks, Justin Michael
Photo: Torje Jenssen
Bilde av Parks, Justin Michael
Department of Language and Culture justin.parks@uit.no +4777644398 You can find me here

Justin Michael Parks


Academic Programme Director for English Literature (one year programme, BA, MA and Teacher Education)

Job description

Justin Parks is Associate Professor in American literature and cultural studies and current academic programme director of the English literature section at UiT. 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.

He is the author of the monograph Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which won the 2024 European American Studies Network Book Prize. 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. His ongoing research investigates the interrelationships between poetry and energy discourses throughout the long twentieth century. His article "At the Expense of Energy: John Ashbery's 'The Skaters' and the Postwar Poetics of Entropy," which forms a chapter of this project, is forthcoming in PMLA.

He is currently Executive Editor of the journal American Studies in Scandinavia.


  • Justin Parks :
    The poetics of extractivism and the politics of visibility
    Textual Practice 2021 DOI
  • Justin Parks :
    Toward a resource poetics in Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead and Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary
    Textual Practice 2021 ARKIV / DOI
  • Justin Parks :
    "Race and National Identity in Modernist Anthropology and Jean Toomer's 'The Blue Meridian'"
    Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2020 ARKIV / DOI
  • Justin Parks :
    "Harry Smith, the Anthology, and the Artist as Collector"
    Routledge 2017
  • Justin Parks :
    Reading and Teaching Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution beyond National Borders
    American Studies in Scandinavia 2017 DOI
  • Justin Parks :
    Charles Reznikoff's 1934 testimony and the idiom of American violence
    Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 2017 DOI
  • Justin Parks :
    "Muriel Rukeyser's Poetics of Extension and the Politics of the Documentary Image"
    Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 2015 DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi, Justin Parks :
    Home, Homelessness and the Wayward Subject in the Novels of James Joyce and Claude McKay
    Peter Lang Publishing Group 2010
  • Justin Michael Parks :
    Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America
    Cambridge University Press 2023 FULLTEKST
  • Justin Michael Parks, Megan Marshall :
    Jean Toomer and What It Means to be American: An Interview With Justin Parks
    Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20. June 2022 FULLTEKST
  • Justin Parks :
    "On Making Graven Images: The Racial Meanings of Death in a Walker Evans Photograph and Its Double"
    2017

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    Research interests

    • Anglophone modernism
    • American Cultural Studies
    • Poetry and Poetics
    • Border Studies, Spatial Geography, Environmental Humanities

    Teaching

    Recent MA-level courses

    • The Development of the Novel: Transatlantic Novels and Narratives
    • William Faulkner and American Modernism
    • Modernism
    • Literature, Text, Education

     

    Recent BA-level courses

    • Introduction to American Studies
    • Modern Poetry
    • B.A. Thesis Seminar

     

    Topics for Supervision

    • Modernism (American, British, international)
    • American Literature
    • Cultural Studies
    • Poetry and Poetics