Jeff Dolven

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).