Ben Glaser
Ph.D., English, Cornell University, 2012
M.A., English, Cornell University, 2008
B.A., Magna Cum Laude with Honors in English, New York University, 2005
My research focuses on the history and practice of prosody, especially in relation to modern poetry. My book project, Modernism’s Metronome, explores debates over prosody from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, focusing on the rejection but also afterlife of traditional meter and practices of scansion. I also co-edited, with Jonathan Culler, Critical Rhythm, a collection of essays developing new approaches to the study of poetic rhythm.
I am excited to be helping develop the Princeton Prosody Archive (1750-1923), an innovative digital collection of over 10,000 texts concerning historical poetics and prosody. The archive will help scholars develop new research projects in poorly recognized but historically central discourses of prosody. Prosody has led me to research and teach the poetics and politics of Hip-hop as well as other musical genres; more generally I enjoy teaching courses that move between literature and music, focusing on sound and its historical mediations.
Selected Publications
- Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics. Hopkins Studies in Modernism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020
- “Introduction” to Critical Rhythm, ed. Jonathan Culler and Ben Glaser. Fordham University Press, 2019
- “Autobiography as ars poetica: Satire, Music, and Rhythmic Exegesis in ‘Saint Peter Relates an Incident’” in New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” Ed. Noelle Morrissette, University of Georgia Press 2017
- “Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost’s Loose Iambics,” ELH 83.2, Summer 2016
- “Folk Iambics, Intertextuality, and Sterling Brown’s Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes,” PMLA 129 no. 3, May 2014
- “Milton in Time: Prosody, Reception, and the Twentieth-Century Abstraction of Form,” Thinking Verse III, January 2014
- “Polymetrical Dissonance: Tennyson, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Classical Meter,” Victorian Poetry 49 no. 2, Summer 2011
Reviews
- “Scanners, Darkly”: Review of Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall, Ohio University Press 2011, Papers in Language and Literature
- Review of Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture 1860-1930, Princeton University Press 2012, Modern Language Quarterly, August 2013
