Matthew Martello
Assistant Director, Center for Poetry & Poetics
I did my undergraduate work at The Ohio State University (BA ’18), where I trained in narratology with faculty in OSU’s Project Narrative. Since coming to UVA, I've devoted most of my research to British and American poetry from the Romantic period to the present; in particular, I study how poets roughly since William Blake have dealt with the representation of character, event, and other phenomena more commonly associated with prosaic than poetical forms.
My dissertation project, “Renovated Spirits: Character and the Modern Dramatic Monologue,” doubles as a history of the post-Victorian dramatic monologue (the genre of poem spoken by someone other than the poet) and a theoretical study of how the representation of character changes under the discursive conditions (meter, rhyme, etc.) peculiar to poetry.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, American Literary Realism, and the Northern Appalachia Review.