Overview
Richard Thomson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English. His research concerns intersections of film and literary form in the twentieth century, transnational modernisms, multiethnic American literatures, poetry and poetics, and media studies. His dissertation, Montage and Mise-en-Page: Sergei Eisenstein in American Modernist Literature, returns to the moment of Eisenstein’s entrance into American culture in the late 1920s in order to explore the aesthetic and political correspondences between his theory of montage and the spatial poetics of Sadakichi Hartmann, Langston Hughes, H.T. Tsiang, José Garcia Villa, and Muriel Rukeyser, who found in montage a way to reframe formal fragmentation as something other than disorder, exhaustion, incoherence, and disempowerment.