Virginia Jackson

Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century.^[1] She is more recently credited with revising the racialized history of American poetics, as the poet Terrance Hayes writes, “If there is a kind of ‘poet’s poet,’ might there also be a kind of ‘poet’s scholar,’ someone a poet reads for lucid, explosive doses of insight and history? Yes: Virginia Jackson. Actually, she’s more than a poet’s favorite scholar, she is a poet’s favorite pathfinding detective. Her brilliant Before Modernism is a radical reorientation of American lyric literary assumptions. Virginia Jackson unearths the overlooked, undervalued Black poets at the root of modern American poetry, and every branch of contemporary poetry trembles with new fruit.”^[2] Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry, the history of American poetry, comparative literature, lyric theory, the history of criticism, the history of poetics, and genre theory.

Jackson is the author of the definition of "Lyric" in the most recent edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.^[3] With Yopie Prins, she is the editor of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).^[4]

Jackson studied comparative literature at UCLA and Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D. She taught at Boston University, Rutgers University, New York University, and Tufts University before going to Irvine in 2012. Her first book, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) won both the MLA Prize for a First Book^[5] and the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa ^[6] Her most recent book is Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (2023).^[7] She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for her work on the history of American poetry.