Divisional Dean of Humanities
As divisional dean, acting on authority delegated by the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Brian Reed supervises the departments, centers, and other units and programs administratively located in the College’s Humanities Division. He broadly supports those units in their teaching, research, and service, and represents them with respect to personnel matters such as faculty hiring, promotion, retention, merit determination, and the awarding of sabbaticals.
Reed belongs to the College of Arts & Sciences’ executive leadership team and, guided by the Dean, engages in collaborative decision-making and financial and strategic planning on behalf of the College. He serves on the Board of Deans and Chancellors for the UW tri-campus system and represents the Humanities Division in a range of University and community initiatives. In all his work, he strives to advance the equity, justice, and inclusion mission of the College and the University.
A professor of English, Reed is a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics and a past Rhodes and Fulbright Scholar. He is the author of three books — “Hart Crane: After His Lights” (2006), “Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics” (2012), and “Nobody's Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics” (2013) — and the co-editor of two essay collections, “Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow” (2003) and “Modern American Poetry: Points of Access” (2013). He has written widely on image-text relations in poetry, on sound in poetry, and on poetry in relation to other arts.
Reed currently serves on the Executive Board of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association and on the Executive Committee of the Poetry and Poetics Forum of the Modern Language Association. He is the editor (poetry) for the journal Contemporary Literature and is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Poetry and Poetics (China), Journal of English Language and Literature (South Korea), Journal of Poetics Research (Australia), and Modern Language Quarterly. A new book, “A Mine of Intersections: Writing the History of Contemporary American Poetry,” is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.
Visit the Humanities Divisional Overview to learn more about the College of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Division.