Nathan Brown
Professor of English, Concordia University

nathan.brown@concordia.ca

I received my Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008, before beginning my career at UC Davis as Assistant Professor of English. At Concordia, I was Canada Research Chair in Poetics from 2015-2025 and am founding Director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. My research moves between literature, philosophy, and the arts, with particular focus on comparative approaches to modern poetry and poetics.

My current book project, The Irony of Ground: Studies in the Poetics of Romantic Modernity, is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2025-2030). Setting out from the suturing of literature, philosophy, and the arts theorized by the Jena Romantics under the concept of romantische Poesie, chapters work through case studies in poetry, fiction, music, architecture, painting, and cinema to situate the enduring importance of romanticism as the interdisciplinary interrogation of contradictions attendant upon the positing of subjective, epistemological, artistic, and political foundations. 

My 2021 book, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique, was awarded Honorable Mention for the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Tracing a dialectic of reason and experience through ancient, modern, and contemporary thought, the book argues that the misleading opposition of speculative and critical approaches to philosophy can be overcome by rethinking the methodological relationship between rationalism and empiricism. My 2017 book, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics, studies concepts and ideologies of structure and form traversing practices of material construction in science and experimental poetry. Reviews have appeared in Boundary2 Online, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere. 

My translation of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal was published by Verso in 2025. My critical study, Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination, was published by Fordham University Press in 2026. Moving through chapters on death, the void, the actuality of the social, and the materiality of the signifier, Baudelaire's Shadow theorizes a dialectic of determination — of agency bound up with its negation — at the heart of The Flowers of Evil.

With Michael Nardone, I edit the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics, DOCUMENTS. With Petar Milat, I have organized an ongoing series of international conferences in Zagreb since 2009, titled Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics. These events have resulted in two edited volumes, The Art of the Concept (2013) and Poiesis (2017).

Books

Articles, Book Chapters, Review Essays

“Race, Reference, and Colonial Modernity in Hölderlin’s Andenken,” forthcoming in Comparative Literature (2028).

“The Irony of Ground,” forthcoming in Yearbook of Comparative Literature 66 (2027).

“Elemental History: Zumthor after Hölderlin,” boundary2 online, 8.1 (May 2026). Link

“Incompleteness: The Project of the Long Poem” in Rethinking the Long Poem (University of New Mexico Press, 2024). Link

“The Existence of the Speculative: Hegel's Theory of the Soul,” boundary2 51:3 (2024) Link

"Alas, poor Yorick!...The Being of Spirit is a Bone," Problemi International 6 (2023). Link

"The Flowers of Andromache: Allegory, Ontology, and Tragedy in Baudelaire's 'Le Cygne'," Crisis & Critique 10.2 (2023): 56-80. Link

"Césaire's Claim: On the Retroactive Genesis of Free Verse," Crisis & Critique 9.2 (2022). Link

“The Revival of Hegelian Marxism: On Martin Hägglund's This Life,” Radical Philosophy 2.06 (Winter 2019). Link

"Postmodernity, Not Yet: Toward a New Periodization," Radical Philosophy 2.01 (February 2018). Link

"More Beautiful, More Intense? H.D.'s Poetics of Comparison" in Poiesis (MaMa, 2017). Link

“Hegel’s Kilogram,” Azimuth 10 (2017). Link

"The Irony of Anatomy: Basquiat's Poetics of Black Positionality," Radical Philosophy 195 (Jan/Feb 2016). Link

“The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier” in The Lure of Whitehead (U. Minnesota Press, 2014). Link

“Hegel’s Cogito,” Parrhesia 20 (2014). Link

“The Distribution of the Insensible,” Mute (January 2014). Link

"The Proletariat," Transcripts 3 (2013). Link

“Origin and Extinction, Mourning and Melancholia,” Mute (September 2012). Link

"Red Years: Althusser's Lesson, Rancière's Error, and the Real Movement of History," Radical Philosophy 170 (Nov/Dec 2011). Link

“Absent Blue Wax,” Qui Parle 19.1 (Fall/Winter, 2010). Link

“Objects that Matter: Olson, Bergvall, and the Poetics of Articulation,” How2, 2.3 (2008). Link