Dr Daniel Rhodes B.A. (Cambridge), M.A. (UCL), Ph.D. (QMUL) Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellow

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Research and Teaching Interests

I completed my PhD at Queen Mary University of London in 2021. My current project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is titled ‘W. B. Yeats, Radium and ‘Field Theory’’, and explores the development of Yeats’s theories of poetic form through his engagement with occult and scientific theories of matter, energy, and fields. I am currently working on a revision of my PhD thesis into a monograph, as well as a new project titled ‘Modernist Materialisms and the Substance of Poetry’. I have taught undergraduate courses on modernism and poetry at QMUL.

My work primarily looks to frame the development of modernist theories of poetic form as a response to a ‘crisis of substance’ that followed the discovery of radium, x-rays, the electron, and radioactivity in the 1890s. In particular, I read the contested modernism of ‘middle’ and ‘late’ Yeats through his participation in mutually informing scientific and occult discourses ranging from radiochemistry, alchemy, electromagnetics, and ectoplasmic séances. By approaching traditionally formalist questions through the lens of shifting material and formal ontologies, my work moves across several disciplines and movements, from Modernist and Irish studies, to the History of Science, to the ‘New Formalist’ and ‘New Materialist’ studies.