Brandon Menke

Biography

Brandon Menke is a poet and assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches and researches American literatures and visual art of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on poetry and poetics, LGBTQ* studies and queer theory, visual culture, literary space, and transmediation.

His current book project, Slow Tyrannies: Queer Lyricism, Visual Regionalism, and the Transfigured World, examines lyric form, regionalist aesthetics, and networks of queer intimacy in American literature and visual art from the 1920s to the 1970s. The book uncovers and details the development of a reparative and regenerative queer lyricism distinguished by its commitments to intermediality, homoerotic desire, past time, and originary place. Based on how such poets and artists as Hart Crane, Marsden Hartley, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Grant Wood, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery bridge image and text, the project deviates from normative schematizations of verbal-visual relations, which have tended to present poetry and painting as embattled camps vying for cultural authority. Slow Tyrannies considers how media are syncretized through novel approaches to signification and aesthetic space that resist stigmatization and affirm queer forms of being.

Dr. Menke received his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Yale University and his MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. He has served as an assistant editor of The Yale Review, poetry editor and editor-in-chief of Palimpsest: Yale Graduate Literary and Arts Magazine, and poetry editor of Washington Square Review. He is a visual artist and designer and has served as a Guest Critic in the Yale School of Art.

Dr. Menke has taught courses on a variety of topics including the avant-garde sensibilities of the New York School of poets and painters, representations of the American city in modern and contemporary literature and art (with special attention paid to formations of race, sexuality, gender, and class), creative writing (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama), and surveys of American literatures from the mid-19th century to the present.

Dr. Menke’s work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Yale Review, Court Green, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Post45: Contemporaries, Ballast, bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, Columbia Journal, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.