Virginia Jackson is a lyric theorist and historian. Her books include Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023), The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (with Yopie Prins; Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), and Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005). She is currently writing two books: What is Poetry? and The Poetry of the Future. Her articles, essays, and reviews appear in Critical Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PMLA, New Literary History, MLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Historical Poetics Working Group and a trustee of The English Institute. She has received two National Endowment for the Humanities awards for her work on the history of American poetry. In 2021, she was the Bain-Swiggett Visiting Poetry Scholar at Princeton. In 2006, Dickinson’s Misery won both the MLA First Book Prize and the Gauss award from Phi Beta Kappa. She has taught at Boston University, Rutgers University, NYU, Tufts, and is currently UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine.
