Daniel Matore

Profile

Biography

Dr Daniel Matore is Lecturer in Modern, American and Comparative Literature, having joined the department in 2021. Daniel read for a BA in English at Homerton College, Cambridge from 2008-2011, where he won the Betha Wolferstan Rylands Prize, and graduated with a double first. He proceeded to complete his MPhil in Criticism and Culture at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a distinction and winning a fully-funded AHRC studentship. He worked at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon between 2012 and 2013 as lecteur d’anglais, where he supervised French undergraduates on a variety of modern British and American writers and gave classes on literary translation. 

In 2015, he was awarded a Joan Nordell Fellowship at the Houghton Library, Harvard University for a project entitled ‘The Genesis of Modernist Typography’. His DPhil, funded by the AHRC, was awarded by the University of Oxford in 2017. From 2018 to 2021, he was Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he also served as course leader and convenor for BA and MA courses in modern and contemporary literature.

The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry, his first monograph, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023, and he has written articles for journals such as Textual Practice and Modernism/ modernity.

Research

Overview

The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry, Daniel's first monograph, published by Oxford University Press in 2023, argues that poets radically adopted typography as a means of literary expression in the twentieth century and examines the work of Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, David Jones, and Charles Olson amongst many others. Drawing on French and Italian poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, F.T. Marinetti, and Guillaume Apollinaire, the book argues for an abstract prosody in British and American poetics in contrast to European modernisms. Using little-known and unpublished archival materials, it traces the genesis of this poetry from draft to proof, and contends that poets became composite figures, annexing the work of designers, compositors, and publishers. It argues that typographic experiment is entrammelled in the advent of free verse, optical health and ophthalmology, racial politics and fascism, and the history of the material text amongst other preoccupations. 

He has recently been researching the narratology of post-war fiction and the nouveau roman, particularly the work of Samuel Beckett, Natalie Sarraute, B.S. Johnson, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. This has taken shape as an article on the work of the British novelist Ann Quin, entitled 'Living Arrangements: Mise-En-Scène and the Nouveau roman in the Fiction of Ann Quin', which will be published by Comparative Literature in 2024.

He has delivered papers at Cardiff, Durham, Royal Holloway, and the London Modernism Seminar over the past few years. Recent articles include ‘Pound’s Transmissions’, Modernism/ modernity (2019) and ‘E.E. Cummings’s Typewriter Language’, Textual Practice (2017). He is also contributing a chapter on modernist poetry and punctuation to the multivolume Punctuation in English Literature.

Supervision

Enquiries from research students wishing to pursue dissertations and theses in poetry and poetics, experimental prose, comparative literature (French, Italian, Greek, Latin), American literature, African American literature, literature and health, or any other topic which might intersect with the above interests are warmly encouraged.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Daniel teaches a range of BA courses in modern, American, and comparative literature and is currently convening the third-year module The Stuff of Poetry: 1900-present, which covers poetics, literary experiment and materiality across several twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets.

Postgraduate

Daniel convenes the module ‘The Sickness of Style’ on the Medical Humanities MA, which looks at literary aesthetics and disease from 1850-present, and covers writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, Yves Bonnefoy, Claudia Rankine, and Dodie Bellamy. 

He is also contributing a seminar on ‘Contemporary Poetics’ to the MA module ‘Poetry and Poetics’.

External activities

Overview

Daniel has been the Editor of the Cambridge Humanities Review since 2012, an interdisciplinary publication founded in part to publicise writing in the arts and humanities to the general public. The review has published seventeen issues and hosted several literary festivals and symposia. A collaborative project with colleagues from several universities, it is an independent publication which publishes work by writers from the UK and the US as well as pieces by other professionals such as lawyers and curators.