Dr Ben Hickman

Ben writes on the relation of work, and connected political issues, to culture. His most recent book is Art, Work and American Life: 1930-2020, published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. This study explores figures ranging from Jackson Pollock to Hannah Arendt, from John Cage to Audre Lorde, and their entanglements with labour: housework, office work, manual labour, managerialism, the gig economy and much else besides. Ben’s previous research has focussed on the political potentials and limitations of poetry, especially regarding the lives and afterlives of the avant-garde, most fully his Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). His work in this area has covered figures including Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov and Amiri Baraka. He has also written on romantic poetry, especially the writing of the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, and is the author of John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Ben is Director of the Centre for Modern Poetry and a co-organiser of Canterbury’s premier series of art/music/poetry events, Free Range. His poetry publications include If Bird, Then Tree (Crater Press, 2017) and Later Britain (Oystercatcher, 2013). He is currently preparing a new cultural history of work.  

Ben's research interests include:

• 20th-century poetry,
• twenty-first-century poetry, 
• American studies, 
• arts activism,
• the avant-garde,
• Canadian writing, 
• the Cold War
• contemporary literature and culture,
• experimental literature, 
• Marxism, 
• modernism, 
• painting
• performance art
• political literature, 
• proletarian writing, 
• revolutionary poetics and liberation movements, 
• the avant-garde, 
• transatlantic literature, 
• working-class literature

Ben currently supervises PhD work in areas across British and American literature of the last 100 years and would welcome any proposals within any of his areas of research interest.