Bradley J. Fest

Associate Professor of English and Babcock 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

Distinctions (awards, fellowships, grants):

• Faculty Research Grants, 2019–20, 2021–22, 2022–23, and 2023–24
• 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:

• “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 Co-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
• Senior Thesis Committee
• Visiting Writers Series Committee
• Anna Sonder Prize Committee
• Member of the Modern Language Association and other professional organizations

External Links