Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Critical Theory in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) and editor of On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute 2008 (2010). She is also coeditor, with Yopie Prins, of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014). Her book Before Modernism: The Invention of American Poetry is forthcoming from Princeton University Press, and she is now working on a new book tentatively titled “After Poetry: Contemporary Black Poetics and the Nineteenth Century.”