Erin J. Kappeler

Erin Kappeler received her PhD from Tufts University in 2014. Her current book project, White Space, Black Lines: The Racialization of Free Verse and the Invention of Modernist Poetics, is the first historical account of free verse poetry as a race-based construction. Through readings of the journals, literary magazines, and poetry anthologies of the modernist era, White Space, Black Lines identifies the fundamental but, until now, neglected connections between prosodic theories of free verse and constructions of American whiteness, and shows how these discourses shaped popular and academic understandings of African American and Native American poetry. Kappeler's research has been supported by the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH. Her work has been published in venues including Modernism/modernity, the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, and the edited collection Critical Rhythm (Fordham UP). More information about Dr. Kappeler’s work can be found at erinkappeler.com.