Marianne Moore and the Archives

The essays that comprise Marianne Moore and the Archives: From Material Culture to the Digital Humanities use new archival research to explore the work of this major American modernist poet, providing innovative approaches to Moore’s career as it is documented in her archives. The volume represents new interpretations of archival materials found at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where Moore’s collection is held. This volume is also the first that draws upon the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA), a major project that is digitizing, transcribing, and annotating Moore’s notebooks for use by scholars, students, and non-academics to make these materials more widely accessible.

Jeff Westover is Professor of English at Boise State University, where he teaches literature. He transcribed Marianne Moore’s Reading Notebook of 1930-1943 (VII.02.02) for the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. He is the author of The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry, which was selected as an outstanding academic title by Choice magazine in 2005. The book uses postcolonial theory to analyze the work of Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Hart Crane. More recently, he has published articles on Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and H.D.