Justin will be Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University starting in 2024. He also has several new publications: The Sound Era: Poetry’s Machinery in the Long Nineteenth Century, under contract with Princeton University Press; “What Thomas Hardy Knew about the Unknowable: We may never know what went wrong with the Titan submersible. A 111-year old poem about the Titanic can help us come to terms with that.” Boston Globe (9 July 2023); “Clipped Reading: Race, Disability, and Class in Silent Film’s Intertitles” for The Time of Close Reading: Victorian Fiction’s Presents (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); "Poems by John Rollin Ridge (Chees-quat-a-law-ny, or Yellow Bird)” (Public Books, forthcoming); “Stethoscape: Auscultation in British Fiction” in Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences in press at Routledge.
Justin Tackett
Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of English, Stanford University
Poetry and Sound Technology, 1816-1914; Hardy and Radio; Poetics and the Prehistory of Silent Film, c.1880-c.1930
In my work, I show how British and American literary (particularly poetic) practices of the long nineteenth century impacted technological development, how literature helped familiarize new technologies, and how literature informs our ongoing engagements with technology. To tell this history, I embrace a full range of early technologies of transmission, transcription, replication, and amplification. The result is a reorientation towards the history of technology that takes into account the literary forces that shaped its trajectory.
Updates
Justin Tackett is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the English Department at the University of Warwick. His article on Emily Dickinson and the telegraph ("'I heard his silver Call': Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of Telegraphic Acoustics" (Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Emerging Scholars Award winner, Review of English Studies, 2019) ) won the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Emerging Scholars Award. His article on Paul Laurence Dunbar ("Fidelity and Paul Laurence Dunbar's Voice(s)" (Victorian Review, 2020)) was published last fall. His students in Stanford's "Stories Everywhere" course won the Creative Project Award for their animatic last fall.
Justin Tackett recently published “'I heard his silver Call': Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of Telegraphic Acoustics" in the Review of English Studies, 2019 as well as "Hearing Wireless in Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain'" a Tolfree Prize Winner in the Thomas Hardy Journal, 2019. His article "The British Novel of Auscultation" is under contract with Routledge. Tackett has also been named a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick.