Rebecca Bradburn has just completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr Erica McAlpine and Professor Tara Stubbs. Her doctoral research was supported by the Drue Heinz-St Johns Scholarship for American Literature and a Fourth-Year Doctoral Scholarship at the Rothermere American Institute. Her work focuses on the relationship between twentieth- and twenty first-century Anglophone poetry and the brain, exploring how poetry represents or suspends cognitive processes.
Her first monograph project, entitled Listen Closely: The Poetics of Listening in Mid-Century U.S. Poetry, investigates ideas of auditory attention in mid-twentieth-century poetry. Zooming in on moments when poets find themselves distracted, this project tells the story of how mid-twentieth century U.S. poetry was vitally shaped by an investment in distraction as a compositional principle. She also writes more broadly about twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry, eco-criticism and the intersection of affect theory and the medical humanities. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to both the environmental and medical humanities, her second book project, prospectively titled Bee on the Brain: Poetry’s Hum, maps how hums permeate and shape twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry, addressing the impact of the climate crisis on cognition.
