English

David Ben-Merre is an associate professor in the Department of English at Buffalo State – SUNY, where he teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, literary theory, and poetry.  He received his B.A. and M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his doctorate from Brown University.  His primary research interests include modernism, poetics, intellectual history, and interdisciplinary studies.  His two book manuscripts Figures of Time (on the figural temporalities of modernist poetry) and The “Super Schoolmaster” ([with Robert Scholes] on the pedagogical guises of Ezra Pound) are presently under review.  Currently, he is working on two other book projects: the first offers an extended look at poetic apostrophe, and the second is on literary misreading.

Since arriving at Buffalo State he has presented at over thirty national and international conferences and individually as an invited lecturer.  He has published on Lord Byron, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and Albert Einstein, World War I poetry, Charles Dickens, Carly Simon, Giorgio Agamben, James Merrill, Martin Amis, Franz Kafka, and the early years of Poetry Magazine; and he has completed new articles on Wallace Stevens, Kurt Gödel, and J.L. Borges.  His introduction to the Modernist Journals Project’s archive of Poetry magazine is available online.  In addition to serving on the Board of Directors for The American Mock Trial Association (the governing board for collegiate mock trial), he enjoys the light recreation of crossword construction (in legal and literary journals, and most recently in the New York Times [01/09/2013]).