James Brophy

Lecturer in Honors

143 Estabrooke Hall
james.brophy@maine.edu
207-581-4887

Ph.D., Boston University
B.A., M.A., University of Maine

I’m a scholar of 19th and early-20th century British and Irish literature and of modern and classical poetry. I’ve taught courses on things like aesthetics, elegy, irony, nature writing, and critical methods, and I also teach Greek and Roman literature and culture for Modern Languages & Classics. My scholarship focuses primarily on poetry and poetics, often including elements of classical reception (how forms and concepts from Greco-Roman antiquity have been inherited and reinterpreted). From 2024-2026 I lived in the UK and worked as an associate managing editor with Oxford University Press and also earned a qualification in teaching English as a second language (CELTA, St. Clare’s, Oxford), developing new interests in academic publishing and applied linguistics.

Why I Teach in Honors:
I love digging into the history and meaning of words, concepts, and institutions across cultures and time. I also love helping students pursue the kinds of creative or scholarly projects that excite them. The interdisciplinary of Honors means we can start with whatever broad and abstract problems or questions about our world we can possibly imagine, and then sort out the right tools to find a meaningful and accurate answer.

Publications:
Samuel Beckett’s Poetry, which I coedited with Will Davies, was published by
Cambridge University Press at the start of 2023. My current ongoing
project, based on my doctoral dissertation, is about poetry, pessimism,
and aesthetic criticism.

Other Selected Publications

• “Beckett Growing Gnomic: The Poems of 1934” in Samuel Beckett’s
  Poetry (2023).
• “‘Pulsating wrongfully’: Cliché, Critique, and The Secret Agent” in
  Politics of Fear, Politics of Hope: Post-critique and Joseph Conrad, ed.
  Jay Parker and Joyce Wexler (Palgrave, 2021): 105-127.
• “Cynic and Lyric Balanced: The War Dead and The Lyric Beloved in
  Keith Douglas,” Twentieth Century Literature 66.1 (Spring 2020): 37-58.
• “‘As if the sex matters’: Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Endgame
  in Love,” in Beckett Beyond the Normal, ed. Seán Kennedy (Edinburgh
  University Press, 2020): 90-103.
• “Walter Pater, Roland Barthes, and Aesthetic Idiosyncrasy: A Critical
  Experiment in Paideia,” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry
  and Poetics, Vol. 45 (2019): 17-34.

I’m the author of short-essay length entries on John Ashbery and Carl
Sandburg for Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Literature in
Context (2019) and wrote “Trying Uncertainty,” a review of Literary Theories
of Uncertainty, ed. Mette Leonard Høeg, for Essays in Criticism (2023). I’ve
also written performance and conference reviews for The Beckett Circle,
the publication of the Samuel Beckett Society.