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 focuses 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. An essay on the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita is forthcoming in a special issue of Cultural Dynamics on "Neoliberalism in the Americas." 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 three 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 or are forthcoming 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 is the co-convener of the Intensive, a graduate reading group focused on works of philosophy and continental theory. He previously coordinated the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Working Group in the Department of English from 2019 to 2021.