PhD The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  Assistant Professor

  Office: 1249A HW

  Office Hours: Tuesday 3:30-5:30

  Phone: 212-772-5165

  Email: mdowdy@hunter.cuny.edu

Professor Dowdy teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in 20^th Century US and Latin American poetry, Latina/o literature, and multi-ethnic literatures of the US. Recent courses have explored questions of citizenship in Latina/o literature and representations of place, space, and nature in post-World War II US poetry.

Professor Dowdy’s first book, American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2007), examines the language of individual and collective agency in various strains of contemporary American poetry and hip-hop music. His articles on African-American, Latina/o, and Mexican poets and on hip-hop culture have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Popular Music and Society, College Literature, MELUS, Hispanic Review, and Appalachian Journal. He has been a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center and in the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar “Toward a Hemispheric American Literature.”

Professor Dowdy’s second book, currently titled Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetics Under the Neoliberal Sign, is forthcoming with the University of Arizona Press. As the first book-length study of the diverse field of Latina/o poetry and the first to put Latina/o and Latin American poets in conversation, Broken Souths presents a literary geography of poetic responses to neoliberalism, the global political project to extend free-market logic to all spheres of life. Chapters feature discussions of Latina/o poets such as Victor Hernández Cruz, Martín Espada, and Juan Felipe Herrera, alongside influential Latin American counterparts, including Roberto Bolaño, Ernesto Cardenal, and José Emilio Pacheco.

As a poet, Professor Dowdy has published a chapbook, The Coriolis Effect (Bright Hill Press, 2007), and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aethlon, Appalachian Journal, Broad River Review, Crab Orchard Review, J Journal, Kestrel, Main Street Rag, Now & Then, and Pembroke Magazine, amongst other places.