Research/Areas of Interest
Contemporary poetry and poetics; Marxism; Feminism; Queer theory; Trans studies; Indigenous studies; Aesthetic theory; Literary theory
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, CAN, 2017
- BA, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom, 2007
- MA, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 2009
Biography
Amy De'Ath's first book, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford UP, 2026) develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil and others, Behind Our Backs explains how capital's gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing.
A second book project, Marxism and Difference, makes a case for the importance of twenty-first century proletarianized aesthetic forms as social theory "from below." Showing how capital's abstract, automatic character has everything to do with our concrete lived realities and political struggles, Marxism and Difference reads feminized poetry, art, protest, and comedy as sophisticated modes of theory that not only work to analyze the capitalist production of raced, gendered, and sexed hierarchies, but reveal in the process many points of contiguity between Marxist and poststructuralist concepts of difference.
Recent essays are published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP), Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, and an edited special issue, "Total Sexual Difference," for Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. She is also the author of several poetry collections, most recently Not A Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024). Before joining the Department of English at Tufts, she was Senior Lecturer at King's College London.
A second book project, Marxism and Difference, makes a case for the importance of twenty-first century proletarianized aesthetic forms as social theory "from below." Showing how capital's abstract, automatic character has everything to do with our concrete lived realities and political struggles, Marxism and Difference reads feminized poetry, art, protest, and comedy as sophisticated modes of theory that not only work to analyze the capitalist production of raced, gendered, and sexed hierarchies, but reveal in the process many points of contiguity between Marxist and poststructuralist concepts of difference.
Recent essays are published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP), Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, and an edited special issue, "Total Sexual Difference," for Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. She is also the author of several poetry collections, most recently Not A Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024). Before joining the Department of English at Tufts, she was Senior Lecturer at King's College London.