Spencer French

Biography

Spencer Clark French (Ph.D. in English, M.A. in American Literature, University of Notre Dame; M.A.R. in Religion and Literature, Yale Divinity School) is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Scholar at the University of Notre Dame, currently instructing in the departments of English and American Studies. Spencer’s first critical monograph, “Religion and Resistance in the Poetry of the Americas” centers on interhemispheric poetry of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is particularly interested in the ways that poets resist, revive, or reimagine religious language for the sake of social justice. In the face of old binaries—secular/sacred or personal/political—so many poets of the Americas have turned to religious traditions to reshape the world around them: whether Denise Levertov’s poetic reconsideration of the Hebrew prophets in the mid-century to combat militarism in Vietnam, Lucille Clifton’s exegetically-resistant renderings of biblical characters to counteract the ways that anti-blackness informs Christian exegesis, Carolyn Forché’s articulation of the relationship between religious tradition and the poetry of witness, or Ernesto Cardenal’s distinct, revolutionary rendering of all three—prophecy, exegetical resistance, and witness.

In addition to his monograph, Spencer is also currently translating the Spanish poetry of the Afro-Colombian poet Rómulo Bustos Aguirre into English as well as working on an article on Walt Whitman and theories of literary influence in the poetry of the Americas.

In the classroom, Spencer is committed to justice-oriented pedagogy. Following in the tradition of Paolo Freire and bell hooks, Spencer tries to create the conditions for learning that is at once liberative, critically sound, and engaged.

Spencer finds himself continually moved by the work and thought of James Baldwin, Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, Marilynne Robinson, José Martí, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thomas Merton, Roque Dalton, Mahmoud Darwish, Simone Weil, Paolo Freire, Ross Gay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Wendell Berry, June Jordan, among many others.

Outside of scholarly inquiry, Spencer is poet, playwright, and writer of creative non-fiction, a teacher of community-based poetry workshops, a mediocre salsa lead, a gardener, and a lover of the beautiful, complicated, beautiful city of South Bend, IN.