Dr Mina Gorji, Pembroke

mg473@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

I'm a University Associate Professor in the English Faculty, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. I've also held fellowships at the University of Oxford (a Career Development Fellowship at Wadham College, a Prize Fellowship at Magdalen College); An Early Career Fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (Cambridge University) and, most recently, the British Academy Mid Career Fellowship.
 
 

Research Interests

My research and teaching focus on Poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries but extends to contemporary lyric. I have published widely on 18th and 19th century poets (including Burns, Bloomfield, Gay, Clare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Rossetti) and on contemporary poetry. My first monograph was on Clare; I have an abiding interest in his poetry and am co-founder and co-director of the Centre for John Clare Studies. I'm curious about forms of social and cultural authority in language and literature and have published essays on weeds, rudeness, mess, working-class poetry and little things and edited and co-edited essay collections on rudeness,  18th and 19th century working-class poetry (Class and the Canon) and a special issue of the journal Romanticism on Clare's 1820 collection Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery.

I enjoy speaking about poetry to wide and diverse audiences and have given public lectures and keynotes in the UK, Berlin, Paris and Warsaw as well as appearing on television and radio programmes for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, as well as In Our Time. 

I have recently completed a major study, Lyric Listening: Sound Encounters in Romantic Poetry,  funded by a British Academy fellowship and energised by a 2 year collaborative research network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Auralities. My book is an exploration of how Romantic poets listened and how they explore different kinds of listening in lyric poetry.  Focussing on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Clare (among others) it thinks about the listening that their poetry describes and invites in relation to a wider history of the auditory. 

I am a practicing poet and my work explores migration at and between different scales: plants, animals, humans, sounds, language itself.  

My first collection, Art of escape (Carcanet, 2020) was highly commended for the Forward Prize and was a Telegraph book of the month. Translated into Italian, Arte della fuga ( a cura di J. Wilkinson. Roma: fuorilinea, 2024), it won the Italian Womens' Prize for Poetry in 2024. Widely reviewed in journals and in the national and international press, The Guardian described it  as a collection which, "encourages us to democratise our attention and empathy." 

My second poetry collection, Scale, was published by Carcanet  in 2022 and was a White Review book of the year, described in The Irish Times as "a book of deep sonic attention". It is currently being translated into Italian.

I've published poems in collections edited by Faber, Forward, Bloodaxe and Carcanet, and a wide range of magazines and journals, including Poetry Review, PN Review, Magma, bad lillies, London Magazine and Poetry Birmingham.  

I have run poetry workshops for RADA, Poetry School, Gingko Prize and Poetry Aldeburgh, and in 2017 judged the Resurgence (now Gingko) Prize, a major prize for eco-poetry, with Lavinia Greenlaw.  I have read at festivals including Stanza, Aldeburgh and Sheaf, in Venice, Florence and in Rome, as part of a series at Nottingham Contemporary (with Jason Allen Paisant). My poems were broadcast on Italian national TV (RAI) as well as on BBC Radio 3's The Verb and as part of a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Volcanic Verse.  

I'm founder member of the Judith E. Wilson Centre for Poetics: https://poetics.english.cam.ac.uk. I've organised and co-ordinated a wide range of readings in college and at the faculty and am committed to bringing a wide range of the most exciting contemporary national and international poets from across the UK and beyond. 

 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Poetry: Eighteenth-century, Romantic, Nineteenth-century and Contemporary womens' poetry.

Authors of particular interest include: Clare, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Christina G. Rossetti.

Areas of Interest include:  Poetry and Place, Sound and Listening, Lyric, Romanticism, writing and environment, working-class poetry, polite and popular culture, literary languages, pastoral, canon formation, primitivism.  I contribute to teaching and supervision for the MPhil in Poetry and Poetics.

 

Selected Publications

Selected Books, articles and essays:

  • "Listening as influence" (2025) Textual Practice, 39(9), 1436–1457. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2547543
  • "Listening at the edge of the line" (2023) English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 72, Issue 276-277, Spring-Summer 2023, Pages 14–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efad015
  • "Lyric Listening", Romantic Circles, Praxis, Special issue on sound; https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/sound/praxis.2023.sound.gorgi
  • Scale (Carcanet, 2022)
  • "Listening for Stars" (Poetry Review, Autumn 2021): https://poetrysociety.org.uk/essay-listening-for-stars
  • "Breaking into Song" (2021) review essay, https://poetryschool.com/theblog/breaking-into-song-war-of-the-beasts-and-the-animals-by-maria-stepanova-translated-by-sasha-dugdale/
  • "John Clare and the Language of Listening", Romanticism, John Clare Special Issue, Volume 26, Issue 2,  2020 [KSAA Annual Essay Prize Honorable Mention, 2020]: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/rom.2020.04
  • Art of escape (Carcanet, 2020); transl. Italian, 2024, Arte della Fuga.
  • "Being Unsituated: Christina Rossetti’s Prepositions”, Nineteenth Century Contexts, An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 41, 2019: Issue 1: Poetics of Place
  •  Class and Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780-1900, ed. Mina Gorji and Kirstie Blair, Palgrave, November 2012
  • ‘John Clare and the Triumph of Little Things’, Class and Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780-1900, ed. Mina Gorji and Kirstie Blair, Palgrave, November 2012
  • ‘John Clare’s Weeds’, Ecology and the Literature of the British Left, ed. John Rignall, H. Gustav Klaus and Valentine Cunningham, Ashgate, 2012, pp. 61-7
  • ‘Burns’s Sentiments: Gray, Milton and ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, Burns and Other Poets. ed. David Sergeant and Fiona Stafford, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp.67-79
  • ‘John Clare and the Poetics of Mess’, Moveable Type, Number 5, 2009, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/graduate/Mina Gorji

  •  John Clare and the Place of Poetry, Liverpool University Press, 2009

  •  'Everyday Poetry: William Hone's Popular Anthology', Romanticism and Popular Culture, Ed. Phillip Connell and Nigel Leask, 2008
  •  Rude Britannia, Ed. Mina Gorji, Routledge, 2007
  •  "Gothic Heritage", TEXTUS 2/2007, Nation(s) and Cultural Heritage, Ed. Maria Rita Cifarelli and Jane Garnett, 2007
  • "John Gay, The Shepherd's Week", A Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, Ed. Christine Gerrard, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 145-156
  • "Burying Bloomfield: Poetical Remains and 'the unlettered' muse'", Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, ed. Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, Bucknell University Press, 2006, 232-252
  •  "Clare's Merry England", John Clare Society Journal 25, 2005, 2-24
  • "Clare's Awkwardness", Essays in Criticism 54.3, 2004, 216-39
  •  "The Savage in Our City: Interrogating Civility at the Royal Academy", Third Text 66, 2004, 41-50
  •  "Writing out of 'Inclosure': John Clare, the 'Old Poets' and The London Magazine", John Clare: New Approaches, Ed. John Goodridge and Simon Kovesi, 2000