David Nowell Smith

My work thus far has primarily been in philosophical poetics, and in particular has been focused on fundamental concepts of poetics: voice, rhythm, form, medium, lyric, metaphor.

I am author of three monographs. Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (Fordham UP, 2013) traced Heidegger's radical rethinking of some of the fundamental concepts of poetics; On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (Palgrave, 2015) focused on just one of these concepts. W. S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (OUP 2022) built on this exploration of the concepts of poetics through a study of a single poetic repertoire, centring on the problematic of poetic objecthood.

I am currently working on a monograph detailing the way the birth of public broadcasting transformed the concept of poetry both as verbal object and social practice, as part of a longer history of the relation between lyric poetry and its technologies of composition and circulation, focused around the relation between public performance and private address.

I am interested in taking on PhD projects on poetry and poetics from across history, including comparative or cross-linguistic approaches, on all areas of critical theory and philosophical aesthetics, on the relation between literature and technology and broadcast media, and on cross-media or intermedia poetics. I have supervised both critical and creative-critical projects.

I currently convene the first year module Reading and Writing Criticism, and the Dissertation modules. I have taught modules in Literature and Philosophy, Romanticism, Lyric, and close reading.

Poetics; Aesthetics; Poetry and Media/Technology; Rhythm; Voice and Orality; History of the Concept of Privacy; Phenomenology; Critical Theory; Cultural Institutions and Policy