Professor

American Literary Studies

British and Irish Literary Studies

Director of Literature

Research Area/s: Poetry & Poetics, Experimental Aesthetics, Political Theories, Science Fiction, and Humor Studies

Contact Information

Email: mrh@unm.edu
Office Location: Humanities 311

Biography

Matthew Hofer writes about and teaches courses on English-language poetry and poetics, especially formally active work in the tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, from modernism to the present.

Hofer’s monograph Omnicompetent Modernists: Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere was published in the University of Alabama Press series Modern and Contemporary Poetics in October 2022. He is at work on a book on postwar American poetry, correspondence, and thought, while seriously deliberating another on “sparseness” in twentieth-century writing.

He has also edited or co-edited seven book-length projects: the language-centered trio LEGEND (2020), L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E newsletter (2020), and The Language Letters (2019); volumes on the politics and aesthetics of Ed Dorn (2013), Sinclair Lewis (2012), and Oscar Wilde (2009); and a special issue of The Langston Hughes Review, “Langston Hughes’s Audiences after the 1930s” (2009).

His work to date has appeared in such periodicals as Modernism/Modernity, New German Critique, Contemporary Literature, Jacket2, American Literary Scholarship, The Journal of English Language and Literature, and Paideuma, and he has also contributed substantive chapters to many edited volumes, including The Cambridge History of American Poetry (“Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists”), The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry (“Contemporary Critical Trends”), and Ezra Pound in Context (“Education”).

In 2012, Hofer founded the University of New Mexico Press series Recencies: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics. Standing at the intersection of critical investigation, historical documentation, and the preservation of cultural heritage, this series exists to illuminate the innovative poetics achievements of the recent past that remain relevant to the present. In addition to publishing monographs and coherent edited volumes, it is also a venue for previously unpublished manuscripts, expanded reprints, and collections of major essays, letters, and interviews.

Proposals for prospective Recencies projects may be sent directly to mrh@unm.edu.