About

Keegan Cook Finberg is the author of Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia University Press), a book about the transformation of the welfare state in the United States after 1960.

Her critical approach to poetry stems from the intersection of feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies, and combines a rigorous attention to literary form with a materialist approach to history. Her next monograph will be about changing state surveillance culture, poetic forms, and myths and ideas about the family. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook called The Thought of Preservation (Ursus Americanus Press) and has published poems in journals.

Finberg is currently an assistant professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary American literature, aesthetic and cultural theory, and poetry. She is also affiliate faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at UMBC.

She grew up in the Bay Area and earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College. After briefly teaching in France and then working in as a civil servant in the arts in San Francsico, she earned her MA and PhD in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she wrote a dissertation about avant-garde and experimental literature in English and French. After she completed her PhD, she held lectureships in English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Vanderbilt University and in English at the University of Southern Indiana.