Michael Martin Shea

Michael Martin Shea studies Hemispheric American poetics, politics, and cultural production across the 20th and 21st centuries, with a special focus on the US and the Southern Cone. His dissertation project centered on poetic representations of visionary and mystical practices from the 1970s to the 1990s as part of a broader, hemispheric response to the so-called neoliberal turn. His other interests include experimental and avant-garde writing, translation studies, spatial theory and environmental humanities, continental philosophy, and media studies. He is the author of seven chapbooks of poetry and hybrid writing, and his work has appeared in such venues as Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fence, jubilat, PEN America, Pleiades, the Best New Poets anthology series, and elsewhere. He is also the translator of Argentine poet Liliana Ponce: a bilingual chapbook, Diario (Diary), was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018, and a second chapbook, Fudekara, appeared in 2022 with Cardboard House Press. Additional translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Poetry, New England Review, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Argentina, he serves as a Series Editor of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology series.

At Penn, he has taught or assisted with undergraduate courses in the English and Romance Languages departments, as well as in the Program in Comparative Literature. He was the co-convener of the Intensive, a graduate reading group focused on works of philosophy and continental theory, from 2020 to 2022. He previously coordinated the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Working Group in the Department of English from 2019 to 2021.