Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University. He has an abiding interest in the relations among reading, writing, teaching, and learning—especially the way readers become writers, as a contemporary and a historical question.
He is the author of three books of criticism: Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), a study of what poets of the sixteenth century did and didn’t learn from school; Senses of Style (Chicago 2018), about what you like and what you’re like; and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet 2017), written in twenty-four hours. His essays for a variety of publications treat a variety of topics: Renaissance metrics, the poet Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s reading, the artist Fairfield Porter, player pianos, and things that are their own handles.
Dolven is also a poet, whose work has appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in two volumes, Speculative Music (Sarabande 2013) and *A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings 2022). He is an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).