Bradley J. Fest

Associate Professor of English

Recent courses taught:

• • Introduction to Textual Analysis
  • Introduction to Creative Writing
  • Intermediate Poetry Workshop
  • Advanced Poetry Workshop
  • Reading Modern Poetry
  • Four Modern American Poets
  • Poetry and Technology
  • Nature Writing
  • John Ashbery in Context
  • Critical Game Studies
  • Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar

  Distinctions (awards, fellowships, grants):

  • Faculty Research Grants, 2019–20, 2021–22, 2022–23, 2023–24, 2024-25, and 2025-26
  • Cora A. Babcock Chair in English, 2022–25
  • Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
  • Nominated for Best of the Net (twice)
  • Winifred D. Wandersee Scholar in Residence, 2019–20
  • Schachterle Prize, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, 2013
  • English Department Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Pittsburgh, 2011
  • Student Paper Award, Science Fiction Research Association, 2011
  • Phi Beta Kappa

  Selected Publications:

  Poetry:

  • 2013–2017: Sonnets (Ipswich, AU: LJMcD Communications, 2024).
  • The Shape of Things  (Norwich, UK: Salò, 2017).
  • The Rocking Chair  (Pittsburgh, PA: Blue Sketch, 2015).
  • Poems published in over forty journal and anthologies, with recent poems in Always Crashing, Call Me [Brackets], The Decadent Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars,  IceFloe Press, and elsewhere.

  Criticism and Scholarship:

  • “Grateful and Generous Reading: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” boundary 2 52, no. 4 (forthcoming November 2025).
  • Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” boundary 2 50, no. 2 (May 2023): 1–30.
  • “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” in “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women,” ed. Courtney Jacobs and James Zeigler, special issue, Genre 54, no. 1 (April 2021): 139–65.
  • “Writing Briefly about Really Big Things,” in Begging the Question: Critical Reasoning in Chaucer Studies, Book History, and Humanistic Inquiry (Mythodologies II) , ed. Joseph A. Dane (Los Angeles: Marymount Institute Press, 2019), 177–81.
  • “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents,” CounterText 4, no. 1 (April 2018): 9–29.
  • “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” (2014), repr. in Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations, by J. Hillis Miller, ed. David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2017), 191–224.
  • “Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper,’” in Scale in Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
  • “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction,” in “Videogame Adaptation,” ed. Kevin M. Flanagan, special issue, Wide Screen 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–23, http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/105/145.
  • “The Function of Videogame Criticism,” review of How to Talk about Videogames, by Ian Bogost, b2o Review, August 3, 2016, http://www.boundary2.org/2016/08/the-function-of-videogame-criticism/.
  • “An Interview with Jonathan Arac,” boundary 2 43, no. 2 (May 2016): 27–57.
  • “Poetics of Control,” review of The Interface Effect, by Alexander R. Galloway, b2o Review, July 15, 2015, http://boundary2.org/2015/07/15/poetics-of-control/.
  • “Geologies of Finitude: The Deep Time of Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 5 (2016): 565–78.
  • “‘Then Out of the Rubble’: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction,” in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–105.
  • “Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive,” in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, ed. Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 81–103.
  • “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” boundary 2 39, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 125–49.

  College service and professional affiliations:

  • Chair, Library and Educational Technology Committee
  • Writing Underground Faculty Advisor
  • Sigma Tau Delta Faculty Advisor
  • Hartwick College Honors Society
  • Member of the Women and Gender Studies Program
  • Faculty Development Committee
  • Organizer of the Faculty Lecture Series
  • Organizer of the Babcock Lecture from 2022-2025
  • Co-Organizer of the 2024 Oneonta Literary Festival
  • Senior Thesis Committee
  • Visiting Writers Series Committee
  • Anna Sonder Prize Committee
  • Member of the Modern Language Association and other professional organizations

External Links