English

Ben Lee

Ben Lee

headshot photo

ADDRESS

304 McClung Tower

Ben Lee

Associate Professor

20th Century, African American, Poetry

Ben Lee teaches courses in modern and contemporary poetry, literary theory, and African American literature.  His research focuses on twentieth-century American poetry and poetics, with a special emphasis on vernacular and avant-garde approaches. He is the author of Poetics of Emergence: Affect and History in Postwar Experimental Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

Education

  • MA, PhD, University of Virginia
  • MA, University of Tennessee
  • BA, Amherst College

Specialties

20th Century, African American, Poetry

Honors

  • Best Faculty Mentor Inside the Classroom, Graduate Students in English, University of Tennessee, 2020
  • Charles Olson Award, Simon Fraser University Department of English, 2019
  • Best Faculty Mentor Outside the Classroom, Graduate Students in English, University of Tennessee, 2017
  • Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award for Assistant Professors, Department of English, University of Tennessee, 2011
  • Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Tennessee, 2010
  • Research Fellow, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2009-10

Publications

Books

  • Poetics of Emergence: Affect and History in Postwar Experimental Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

Articles

  • “Baraka’s Speculative Revolutions.” Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka, ed.  Jean-Philippe Marcoux (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press,2021), 134-45.
  • “Spontaneity and Improvisation in Postwar Experimental Poetry,” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, eds. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 75-88.
  • “Avant-Garde Poetry as Subcultural Practice: Mailer and Di Prima’s Hipsters,” New Literary History, 41.4 (Autumn 2010), 775-794.
  • “Howl and Other Poems: Is There Old Left in These New Beats?” American Literature, 76.2 (June 2004), 367-89.
  • “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the Limits of Open Form,” African American Review, 37.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2003), 371-87.

Reviews

  • Review of George Cotkin, Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility. Modernism/modernity, 24.2 (April 2017): 426-28.
  • “Fred Moten’s Gentle Ferocity,” Lute & Drum (February 2015).
  • Review of Hazard Adams’s The Offense of Poetry, Modern Philology, 101.9 (August 2011), E1-E4.
  • “Frank O’Hara and the Turn to Friendship.” Review Essay on Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship in Postwar American Poetry and Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, Criticism 49.2 (Spring 2007), 243-247.