Dorothy J. Wang

Dorothy Wang

Professor of American Studies, Emerita

dwang@williams.edu
413-597-3219
Office Hours

Education

B.A. Duke University
M.P.A. Princeton University
M.A. Johns Hopkins University, Writing
Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, English Literature

Scholarship/Creative Work

Books

Wang’s monograph, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), won the Association for Asian American Studies’ Award for Best Book of Literary Criticism in 2016 and was awarded Honorable Mention in the inaugural Pegasus Awards for Poetry Criticism, given by the Poetry Foundation:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/criticism-award

It was also chosen by Ben Lerner for The New Yorker’s “The Books We Loved in 2016” Year-end list:

Thinking Its Presence

Articles & Essays

  • “The Future of Poetry Studies,” The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry, ed. Timothy Yu, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • “English Poetics and the Inconvenience of History,” Poetry Review (UK), spring 2020 issue, guest eds. Mary Jean Chan and Will Harris.
  • Preface to Filigree: Contemporary Black British Poetry, ed. Nii Ayikwei Parkes (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree Press, 2018).
  • “Asian American Poetry and the Politics of Form,” The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, ed. by Min Song and Rajini Srikanth, Cambridge UP, 2015.
  • “Speculative Notes on Bhanu Kapil’s Monstrous/ Cyborgian/ Schizophrenic Poetics,” in Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets, ed. by Timothy Yu, Kelsey Street Press, 2015.
  • “From Jim Crow to ‘Color-Blind’ Poetics” in the “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde” online forum, Boston Review, March 10, 2015.

The first and only national conference on race and creative writing was named after the book and has been convened three times, twice at the University of Montana and once at the University of Arizona.

Wang is also the conceiver and co-founder of the Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) initiative, which as opened up discussions of race and colonialism in UK poetics.

Research Interests

  • Race and aesthetics
  • Contemporary poetry in English, esp. experimental minority poetry
  • English poetics
  • Twentieth- and twenty-first-century American and British poetry
  • Asian American literature, especially poetry
  • Black British Poetry
  • Anglophone Chinese diasporic literature