Jason David Hall
Jason Hall's main research interests are poetry and poetics, and more specifically prosody, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of his recent publications include "Popular Prosody: Spectacle and the Politics of Victorian Versification", published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007); Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator (Palgrave, 2007), a collection of twelve essays edited with Professor Ashby Bland Crowder; and "Form and Process: Seamus Heaney’s 'A New Life' into 'Act of Union'", which appeared in Frank Beardow and Alison O’Malley-Younger’s Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (University of Sunderland, 2005). Hall has published essays on Heaney’s poetics in New Voices in Irish Criticism 3 (Four Courts, 2002) and the peer-reviewed journals ANQ (2004) and The Explicator (2002). In addition to these publications, he is finishing a monograph entitled Embedded Poetics, which employs a species of contextualized formalism to investigate the nuances of Heaney’s prosody, placing his work as "metrist" in the context of post-war Ireland.
Future book-length projects extend Jason Hall's investigation of how poetry and poetics are culturally, historically and politically "embedded". One of these is a cultural history of Victorian prosody, entitled Promiscuous Feet. With the Centre for Victorian Studies at Exeter, he is organizing a conference called "Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780-1914", to be held in July 2008. With Jason Whittaker of University College Falmouth, he is co-founder of the online Prosody Network.
Beyond the strictly poetic, Jason Hall has an interest in literature and film related to crime and mystery, as well as American literature. From 2004 to 2008 he was Assistant Editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, and recently he was made Reviews Editor of The European Journal of American Culture. Hall's interest in the literature and culture of America, particularly the South, carries over into his undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.
In recent years Jason Hall has written material for a variety of reference and popular publications, including The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story and Short Fiction (2007), the online Literary Encyclopedia and Emagazine, a quarterly magazine for English A-level students. In 2006 he contributed to the programme of an Exeter production of Ted Hughes's version Alcestis.
