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.