John Marsh is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of three books. The first, Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Bus Boys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry (2011), offers a revisionary his
...MoreJohn Marsh is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of three books. The first, Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Bus Boys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry (2011), offers a revisionary history of poetic modernism that recovers the decisive role workers and the poor played in the formation of early twentieth-century American poetry. The second, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality (2011), debunks the popular belief that what causes poverty and economic inequality in the United States is lack of education and, thus, that what will fix these ills is more and better education. The third, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself (2015), argues that the poetry of Walt Whitman can help us overcome the various sources (death, money, sex, political disgust) of malaise in the 21st century. In addition to these, Marsh is the editor of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941 (2007), which collects some of the thousands of remarkable but largely forgotten poems workers and labor organizers published in their union newspapers in the 1930s. The anthology won the 2007-2008 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing from the Working-Class Studies Association. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, College English, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and more popular venues like The Chronicle Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Inside Higher Ed, The Hedgehog Review, Salon, and The Utne Reader. He is currently at work on two books. The first, a cultural history of the 1930s called This Dark Hour: The Emotional Life of the Great Depression, tells the story of the Great Depression through its paradigmatic emotions: despair, anger, sympathy, righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and, finally, hope. The second, titled Sobriety and the Spectacle, reconsiders the role that entertainment plays and should play in contemporary life. In recent years, Marsh has taught undergraduate and graduate classes on modern and contemporary poetry, nineteenth-century American poetry, the 1930s, and the economics, philosophy, and literature of inequality.
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New Directions in the Humanities
