Nathan Brown
Canada Research Chair in Poetics
Associate Professor of English, Concordia University

My research moves between poetics, philosophy, and science/technology studies, investigating conceptual and material determinations of structure and form. I am currently working on a critical history of "interdisciplinary" orientations toward poetics in modernity titled Expanded Poetics: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary. Setting out from the Jena Romantics' approach to poetics as a field encompassing science, philosophy, and the arts, I trace this expanded approach to poetic theory and practice through modernist and contemporary transformations.

My most recent books, published as companion volumes by MaMa in Fall 2021, are a critical study titled Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination and a complete translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.

My second book, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham 2021), argues that the false opposition of speculative and critical approaches to philosophy can be overcome by rethinking the methodological relationship between rationalism and empiricism. Tracing a dialectic of reason and experience through ancient, modern, and contemporary thought, the book engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Badiou, as well as recent work in the science of metrology and experimental digital photography.

My first book, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics (Fordham UP, 2017), studies concepts and ideologies of structure and form traversing practices of material construction in science and poetry. Reviews have appeared in Boundary2 Online, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere.

With Michael Nardone, I edit the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics, DOCUMENTS. With Petar Milat, I have organized an ongoing series of symposia in Croatia since 2009, titled Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics. These events have resulted in two edited volumes, The Art of the Concept (2013) and Poiesis (2017).