Nathan Brown received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008 before beginning his career at UC Davis as Assistant Professor of English. He joined Concordia in 2014 as Canada Research Chair in Poetics, and founded the Centre for Expanded Poetics in 2015. Professor Brown's research moves between literature, philosophy, and the arts, with particular focus on comparative approaches to modernism and on 20th century American poetry.
His 2021 book, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique, was awarded Honorable Mention for the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. The book argues that the misleading opposition of speculative and critical approaches to philosophy can be overcome by rethinking the methodological relationship between rationalism and empiricism. Tracing a dialectic of reason and experience through ancient, modern, and contemporary thought, Brown engages with such thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Badiou, and Meillassoux, as well as recent work in the science of metrology and experimental digital photography.
His 2017 book, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics, studies concepts and ideologies of structure and form traversing practices of material construction in science and experimental poetry. Reviews have appeared in Boundary2 Online, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere.
His most recent books are a critical study titled Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination and a complete translation of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, which will be published in a new edition by Verso in 2024.
Professor Brown's current project, supported by a four-year SSHRC Insight Grant, is a study of interdisciplinary orientations toward poetics in modernity titled Expanded Poetics: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary. Setting out from the Jena Romantics' approach to poetics as a field encompassing science, philosophy, and the arts, the project traces this expanded approach to poetic theory and practice through modernist and contemporary transformations.
With Michael Nardone, Professor Brown edits the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics, DOCUMENTS. With Petar Milat, he has organized an ongoing series of symposia in Croatia since 2009, titled Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics. These events have resulted in two edited volumes, The Art of the Concept (2013) and Poiesis (2017).
Education
PhD, University of California at Los Angeles (2008)
MA, Queen's University (2002)
BAH, Queen's University (2001)
Fields of research and teaching
Poetry and Poetics
Philosophy and Critical Theory
Modernism
Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Arts
