Virginia Jackson

Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine.

She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century.

Jackson is the author of the definition of "Lyric" in the most recent edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

[2] With Yopie Prins, she is the editor of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Her first book, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) won both the MLA Prize for a First Book[4] and the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa [5] Her most recent book is Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (2023)[6], which the poet Terrance Hayes describes as "a radical reorientation of American lyric literary assumptions," in which Jackson "unearths the overlooked, undervalued Black poets at the root of modern American poetry, and every branch of contemporary poetry trembles with new fruit.”[7] She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for her work on the history of American poetry.

2020 “Historical Poetics and the Dream of Interpretation: A Response to Paul Fry, Modern Language Quarterly, 81:3 (September 2020), 289-318.

2018 “’Our Poets’: William Cullen Bryant and the White Romantic Lyric,” New Literary History, 49:4 (Autumn 2018), 521-551.

2008 “Bryant; or, American Romanticism,” in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed.

2008 “The Story of Boon; or, Parables of the Poetess,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , vol.