Seth Perlow specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary US literature, poetry and poetics, new media studies, and critical theory. His research and teaching are particularly focused on avant-garde US poetry since 1945, the cultural history of electronics, and postmodern US fiction.
His book, The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), traces a lineage of poets who use electronics to distinguish poetry from critical thinking. He edited Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition (City Lights, 2014), which earned a Seal of Approval from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Emily Dickinson Studies , Criticism , Paideuma , Convergence , The Wallace Stevens Journal , and elsewhere. His shorter essays about poetry and society have appeared or are forthcoming in the Washington Post , Public Books , the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Post45: Contemporaries. His poetry has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, The Cortland Review, The Common , and elsewhere. Before coming to Georgetown, he was assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and the 2014-15 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He is currently working on a book-length study about literary handwriting analysis in electronic media, tentatively titled "The Digital Hand: Electronics and Literary Manuscripts."
At Georgetown he offers courses on twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, poetry and poetics, and media history and theory. He is an affiliate of the American Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Writing Programs.