Dr. John Lowney
Professor
B.A., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, English and American Literature
M.A., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, English and American Literature
Ph.D., Brown University, English and American Literature
Research Focus: Modern and Post-modern American literature, American poetry, African American Literature
Since joining the faculty of St. John’s in 1996, John Lowney has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in twentieth-century American and African American literary and cultural studies, including American poetry, modernism and postmodernism, American literature and culture of the 1930s, and the Harlem Renaissance. He is the author of two books on twentieth-century American poetry: The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell University Press, 1997) and History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968 (University of Iowa Press, 2006). Each of these books addresses the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in U.S. literary history. He has also been the recipient of grants such as the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at the Beinecke Library (Yale University) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant. He is currently pursuing research on jazz, internationalism, and African American modernism.