M.F.A. University of Iowa, 1991
B.A. Boston University, 1987

Joshua Clover specializes in poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on contemporary and 20th Century American poetry. He is an affiliated faculty member for the Film Studies Program and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.

He has contributed poetry and critical writing to over 20 anthologies and various journals, and contributes to the New York Times Sunday Book Review and The Nation. He serves on the Editorial Board of Film Quarterly.

In 2010-2011, he was a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, researching a book project on poetry and political economy. 

Publication Spotlight

1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About
by Joshua Clover

In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as "the end of history."

"Joshua Clover finally puts the lie to the tiresome cliche that 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture.' He shows definitively that when the time is right, architecture is precisely what people do dance about." — Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces

"Joshua Clover's 1989 might be called a time spansule, so potent and compressed that upon application the entire year comes flooding back. Music and politics, drugs and society prove to be eerily congruent, and Clover's tough analysis dismantles prevailing myths while revealing even stranger truths." — Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

Publications

• 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About (University of California Press 2009)
• The Totality For Kids (University of California Press 2006)
• The Matrix (British Film Institute 2004)
• Their Ambiguity (Quemadura 2003)
• Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State University 1997)

Honors

• Resident Fellow, Cornell Society for the Humanities, 2010-2011
• Best American Poetry, 2003, 2001, 1997
• Best Music Writing, 2009, 2007
  
• Robert D. Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Writing, 1999
• Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 1997, 1998
• Walt Whitman Award for First Book of Poetry, Academy of American Poets, 1996
• National Endowment for the Arts individual fellowship, 1994
• Michener/Engle Fellowship in Poetry, 1993-1994
• Resident Fellow in Poetry, Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, 1992-1993
• University Prize For Excellence in Teaching, 1991