Faculty Profiles

Jennifer Formichelli

BA, Boston University (University Professors Program)
MPhil, Newnham College, University of Cambridge
PhD, Newnham College, University of Cambridge

Jennifer Formichelli teaches both first and second-year Core humanities. After receiving a BA in literary history from BU in 1996, she completed an MPhil in American literature and a PhD in English literature at the University of Cambridge, where she wrote her thesis on 'Scenes and Situations in T.S. Eliot's Epigraphs'.

Prof. Formichelli with Henry and Charles, in Gloucester Photo by Jim McCue

Her interests range widely across English poetry from Shakespeare to Modernism, particularly Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the King James Bible, the metaphysical poets, Tennyson, Lear & Carroll, the Great War poets, T.S. Eliot and William Empson. She is particularly interested in allusion and metaphor, paratexts and marginalia, speech-acts and linguistic philosophy, the history of literary criticism and the art of the essay.

Professor Formichelli has published in Essays in Criticism, Cambridge Quarterly, Notes and Queries, and most recently on 'Seventeenth Century Literature' in T.S. Eliot in Context (ed. Jason Harding, Cambridge University Press, 2011). She is currently a co-editor of The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 8 vols ( The Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2014), and is working on a book on epigraphs in English literature.

Professor Formichelli lives in Jamaica Plain with her two dogs, Charles and Henry. She enjoys dreaming of the ocean, walking the dogs, figure skating (and falling), cooking, NPR, the New York Times, and Netflix.

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