Matthew Kilbane

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. Opening our lyric archives to such things as pop songs, radio poems, closet operas, and speech-music, the book’s media theory of the lyric shows how literary scholars can look to media history to understand transformations in the social life of poetry, and how media archaeologists can read lyric forms for insight into the cultural history of technology. The Lyre Book was awarded the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2021 Book Award, and has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Beinecke Library, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.

Kilbane is currently extending this focus on lyric techniques and technologies in two newer projects: an edited collection of essays exploring how social media platforms are reshaping poetry’s publics around the world, and a study of community-based writing workshops and other marginalized institutions of verse making.

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.