Matthew Kilbane
Glynn Family Honors Assistant Professor of English
Faculty Affiliate, Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society; Faculty Affiliate, History and Philosophy of Science; Faculty Affiliate, Initiative on Race and Resilience
- Office
- 217 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - Phone
- +1 574-631-0001
- mkilban3@nd.edu
Areas of study
- American
- Science, Media, and Technology
Education
Ph.D. Cornell University
M.F.A. Purdue University
B.A., Oberlin College
Research and teaching interests
20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture; poetry and poetics; sound studies; media theory; digital humanities
Biography
Matthew Kilbane teaches and writes about modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., poetry and music, the history of sound technologies, and digital literary cultures. His first book, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), unfolds a disciplinary meeting place for literary and media studies around modern lyric poetry. Written with support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Beinecke Library, The Lyre Book was awarded the Northeast Modern Language Association’s Book Award. Kilbane is also the editor of Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures (Amherst College Press, 2025), a collection of essays on digital media and the social life of contemporary poetry, and he is currently writing a book on community-based poetry workshops and other marginalized institutions of verse-making. This latter project has received fellowship support from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the Newberry Library. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, ELH, MLQ, American Literature, and elsewhere.
Recent courses have included “Poetry and its Publics,” “Forms of Attention,” “Technology and Desire,” and the graduate seminar “Poetry and Everyday Life.” In 2026 he was honored to receive the Graduate Student Government’s Outstanding Mentor Award. Before arriving at Notre Dame, Kilbane served as the Joseph F. Martino Lecturer at Cornell, where he also taught with the Cornell Prison Education Program
Representative publications
- The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media, Hopkins Studies in Modernism, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024.
- Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures, Amherst College Press, June 2025.
-
“Street Scenes: Langston Hughes, Lyric Pop, and Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire,” American Literature, vol. 96, no. 3 (2024): 443-472.
-
“Muriel Rukeyser’s Idea of Poetry: A History of Abstraction,” Modernist Cultures, vol. 19, no. 2-3 (2024): 312-333.
- “A Speech-Musical Modernism: Harry Partch’s Lyric Media,” PMLA, vol. 135, no. 3 (2020): 511-29.
