The English Department Welcomes New Faculty in 2025
We are very pleased to introduce Amy De’Ath, who will be joining the English Department in September 2025 as an Assistant Professor specializing in 20th & 21st Century Global Anglophone Poetry and Poetics.
Dr. De’Ath comes to Tufts from King’s College London, where she was Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. Her first book, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction, which will appear from Stanford University Press in February 2026, argues that queer, trans, Indigenous and diasporic poetries from the US, Canada, and Indigenous territories draw on an historical reservoir of formal techniques and problems to apprehend what Marx called “domination by abstraction”: in subjective terms, the sense that one’s life is intimately shaped by forces located elsewhere. Reading global Anglophone poetry alongside media and visual art emerging from feminist and Indigenous struggles over social reproduction, Dr. De’Ath’s second book-in-progress addresses the longstanding impasse between poststructuralist and Marxist accounts of difference in contemporary literature and culture.
Coming to Tufts with an impressive record of scholarship, teaching, and professional service, Dr. De’Ath is also the author of a book of poetry, Not a Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024), and a poetry anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press, 2015), co-edited with Fred Wah. We very much look forward to welcoming her to the English Department in the Fall.
New Lecturers in First-Year Writing
Paul Driskill received his PhD in English literature from Tufts’ English department in 2024. He is interested in the history and philosophy of science, narrative, the gothic, monsters, horror, and writing in the university. In addition to teaching, he tutors doctoral candidates and helps doctoral programs better serve graduate students at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has published in The Victorian Review, Studies in the Novel, and Configurations. He enjoys reading, writing, running, frisbee, video games, and watching horror movies.
Kelly Gray is a PhD candidate in English at Boston College. She plans to defend her dissertation on contemporary American literature, the environmental humanities, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the fall. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Cleveland Review of Books, Hobart, Expat, and Maudlin House, among others.
Charline Jao received a PhD in English from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the American nineteenth century, with an emphasis on print culture, abolition, and representations of children. Her work has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Quarry Farm Fellowship Program at the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Rural Humanities Initiative at Cornell. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Periodicals, Commonplace, Comparative Literature, and American Literary Realism.
Carl Lavigne holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Sometimes he sets it down. His work appears in Black Warrior Review, Hunger Mountain, LitHub, and disappears in direct sunlight.