Dr Rebecca Bradburn

Rebecca’s research tracks the relationship between poetry and the brain, specialising in Anglophone poetics from the twentieth century to the present. Developing her doctoral thesis, her first monograph project, entitled ‘Silence Please: Poetry in the Era of the Earworm’, reveals the importance of acoustic distraction to the formal and aesthetic innovations of mid-twentieth-century US poetry. Where silence is conventionally framed as the solution to writer’s block, ‘Silence Please’ zooms in instead on moments when poets find themselves sidetracked by radio jingles, earworms or street noise. In so doing, the project tells the story of how mid-century US poets invested in distraction as a generative compositional principle.

Dr Bradburn teaches widely across the period 1760–present. At St Edmund Hall, she will be teaching Prelims Paper 3: Literature in English, 1830–1910, Prelims Paper 4: Literature in English, 1910–Present and FHS Paper 5: Literature in English 1760–1830.