English

Ben Lee

Ben Lee

Ben Lee

Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies

304 McClung Tower
Phone: (865) 951-4370
Fax: (865) 974-6926
blee15@utk.edu

Biography

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

  • B.A., Amherst College
  • M.A., University of Tennessee
  • M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia

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.

Awards, Honors & Grants

  • 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