About

I hold a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto (2020). My dissertation is entitled The Voice Prints of Poetry: Recorded Speech and the Listener’s Body in Victorian and Modernist Verse. In it, I study the relationship between the speaker’s voice, both in Victorian and Modernist poems and in relation to sound recording technologies that include the phonograph and American radio, and the listener’s or reader’s body. I argue that Robert Langbaum’s foundational argument about using sympathy as the key determinant for whether a poem is a dramatic monologue fundamentally misses the importance of the reader’s own embodied responses to these voices in poetry with dramatic qualities. My work argues for the primacy of the reader’s body and their empathetic responses to speaker’s voices in such poetry.