Rachel Trousdale Professor of English Framingham State University 100 State Street PO Box 9101 Framingham, MA 01701-9101 Email: rachelvtrousdale at gmail.com Research and teaching interests: poetry; comics; science fiction and fantasy; humor

Poetry

Poetry book



My poetry book Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, was selected by Robert Pinsky as the inaugural winner of Wesleyan University Press's Cardinal Poetry Prize. Here's a review by Sara Stoudt in Psaltery & Lyre. "A rare gift in art is directness: to turn a clear, unsentimental gaze on love and grief in all their variations, with no smokey or mysterioso evasions. Almost as valuable is meaningful surprise, the stunned laughter of recognition even if the subject for marvel is loss. The heartfelt, unpredictable poems of Rachel Trousdale attain that kind of discovery." --Robert Pinsky

Chapbook



Antiphonal Fugue For Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone, Finishing Line Press, 2015. Click here to read about the chapbook in an interview with Nancy Chen Long, or here for an interview at The Chapbook Interview.



• An elegy for Renee Nicole Good at Vox Populi.
• Three poems at One Art.
• Syllabus at SWWIM Every Day.
• Units of Measure at Stone Circle Review.
• For a Child Drowned off Lesbos at Rise Up Review.
• Two poems at Split Rock Review.
• Optics Lab. at Psaltery and Lyre.
• The Second Baby Explains the Unthinkable at The Nation
• The Reef at The Yale Review.
• Young Peggy Plays Taps. Literary Imagination (2012) 14(3): 352.
• Five poems and an interview at Connotation Press.
• Three poems at Two Serious Ladies.
• My poems have also appeared in 32 Poems, The Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Light, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Natural Bridge, Sou'wester, The Southern Poetry Anthology, So Little Time, you are here, Confrontation, and Pocket Field Guide, among other places.
  

Research

Books



Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.





Humor in Modern American Poetry, an edited collection with contributions by Stephanie Burt, Marta Figlerowicz, Hugh Haughton, Lena Hill, Megan Leroy, Karin Roffman, Alan Shapiro, Joel Slotkin, and William Solomon. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Click here to see the table of contents or read the introduction.





Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Click here for a review from Twentieth Century Literature 58: 2 (2012): 355-364.


Selected Articles


• "Elizabeth Bishop's Questioning Seabirds." Bishop-Lowell Studies 5 (2025): 70-84.
• "'Moving Under My Dress': C.D. Wright and Clothing." Post45 November 2025.
• "Teaching Critical Race Theory with Orlando and The Dreadnought Hoax." Virginia Woolf Miscellany 101 (Fall/Winter 2023): 24-26.
• "Damned Universal Cock: Wallace Stevens' Eternal Present." Wallace Stevens in Theory, ed. Ian Tan Xing Long and Thomas Gould. Liverpool University Press, 2023.
• "Autobiography and the Empathic Imagination in 'Ernie Pook's Comeek.'" Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, ed. Jane Tolmie. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2022.
• "Bishop's Humor." Elizabeth Bishop in Context, ed. Jonathan Ellis and Angus Cleghorn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 302-312.
• "'My Scheme was a Marvel of Primitive Art': Durable Pigments in Lolita." Nabokov Studies: Special Issue in Honor of Priscilla Meyer. Nabokov Studies 16:1 (Spring 2020).
• "'I Take Off My Hat': Elizabeth Bishop's Comedy of Self-Revelation." Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion. Ed. Jonathan Ellis. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2018, 77-89.
• "The Right to Smile: Humor and Empathy in Prufrock and Other Observations." Eliot Studies Annual 2 (2018): 37-46.
• "Transnationalism." Nabokov in Context, ed. Siggy Frank and David Bethea. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 275-282.
• "Teaching Comic Narratives." Teaching Narrative. Ed. Richard Jacobs. London: Palgrave, 2018, 71-85.
• "Humor and Community in Auden's Late-Thirties Poetry." Humor in Modern American Poetry, ed. Rachel Trousdale. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, 153-173.
• "Salman Rushdie and Islamophobia." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature Prepublished March 30, 2017.
• Round Table with Priscilla Meyer, Will Norman, and Dale E. Peterson, moderated by Yuri Leving, "Approaches to Teaching Nabokov's Pale Fire." Nabokov Online Journal Volume 9 (2015).
• "Panthers and Jaguars: Realism and Responsibility in Salman Rushdie's Shame." Critical Insights: Magical Realism, ed. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo. Armenia, NY: Gray House Publishing, 2014, 178-192.
• "Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov." Co-written with Priscilla Meyer. Comparative Literature Studies 50: 3 (2013): 490-522.
• "A Female Prophet? Female Authority and Memory in Marjane Satrapi." Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, ed. Jane Tolmie. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2013, 241-263.
• "'Humor Saves Steps': Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore". The Journal of Modern Literature 35: 3 (2012): 121-138.
• "Nabokov and the Transnational Canon." The Nabokovian 66 (Spring 2011): 7-14.
• "Chabon, Nabokov, and the Model Transnational." Transitional Nabokov, ed. Duncan White and Will Norman. London: Peter Lang UK, 2009, 99-114.
• "Incest and Intertext: Mansfield Park in Ada." The Nabokovian 61 (Fall 2008): 48-52
• "Hybridity and the Artist in Out of Africa" in On the Road to Baghdad, or, Traveling Biculturalism, ed. Gonul Pultar. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2005, 169-190.
• "City of Mongrel Joy: Bombay in Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39:2 (2004): 95-110.
• "Faragod Bless Them: Anna Karenin and Electricity in Ada." Nabokov Studies 7 (2003): 119-128.
• "Self-Invention in Isak Dinesen's 'The Flood at Norderney.'" Scandinavian Studies, Volume 74 No, 2 (2002): 205-222. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, Volume 75 (2004) and Twentieth Century Literature Criticism, Volume 255 (2011).
• "Transformations of Memory: Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Merrill" in Nabokov's World, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold B. McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer, Macmillan, 2002, 192-203.

Videos

• "Humor Saves Steps: Laughter and Fellow-Feeling in Modern Poetry," delivered as part of Agnes Scott College's ACME lecture series, September 6, 2011.
• "An Imaginary Poet", delivered as part of Agnes Scott College's "Last Lecture" series, February 10, 2009; this piece is somewhere between literary criticism and performance art.
• A discussion of Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis, featuring students who asked for and designed an independent study in graphic novels in the spring of 2008. This discussion was distributed to incoming first-year students the following fall as part of Agnes Scott College's first-year common reading program.

• Curriculum Vitae (pdf)