Position Title
Associate Professor of English
Education and Degree(s)
- Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley
- MFA (Poetry), Indiana University
- BA, Beloit College
Profile
Margaret Ronda joined the UC-Davis faculty in 2014 after teaching in the Department of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. Particular areas of interest include Marxist criticism, aesthetic and genre theory, ecological literary modes, and avant-garde poetics. Her critical book, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End(Post*45 Series, Stanford University Press, 2018), attends to the ways American poets and poems dramatize an ever-clearer sense of planetary environmental crisis by reimagining poetic genres such as pastoral and elegy. Her essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar won the William Riley Parker Prize from the MLA for the "outstanding essay" in PMLA in 2013. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. She is the author of two books of poetry, Personification (2010) and For Hunger (2018), both published by Saturnalia Books.
Selected Publications
Critical Book:
Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Stanford University Press, Post*45 Series)
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28109
Articles:
"Anthropogenic Poetics." the minnesota review 83, Winter 2014. Special issue on "Writing the Anthropocene." Eds. Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall.
"Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene." Post45 Peer Reviewed, June 2013.
"Georgic Disenchantment in American Poetry." Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 46.1, Spring 2013.
"'Work and Wait Unwearying': Dunbar's Georgics." PMLA 127.4, October 2012.
"Agency Without Subjects." English Language Notes 50.1, Spring/Summer 2012.
Book Chapters:
Forthcoming: "'Everywhere, Worlds Connect': Realist Poetics and the Ecologies of Capitalism." In Writing Against Capital: Communism and Poetics. Eds. Julian Murphet and Ruth Jennison. Palgrave.
"Obsolesce." Veer Ecology. Eds. Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert. U of Minnesota P, 2018.
"'At the edge of what we know': Gender and Environment in American Poetry." Cambridge Companion of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Ed. Linda Kinnahan. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
"'Not one': The Poetics of Multitude in Great Recession-Era America." In Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature. Ed. Andrew Lawson. Routledge, 2014.
"Red." Co-authored with Tobias Menely. In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota University Press, 2014.
Other Essays:
Introduction and essay, "Outside of Knowledge," Feature on "The Poet-Scholar," Jacket2, 2015.
"'Not Much Left'": Wageless Life in Millenial Poetry." Post45 Contemporaries, 2011.
Poetry Books:
Forthcoming: For Hunger, Saturnalia Books (2018).
Personification, Saturnalia Books, 2010.