Department Chair
Klapper Hall 603
718-997-4964
[email protected]
Research Interests
My research focuses on Victorian literature and culture, 19th-century British poetry, and literary translation. My current book project book (“Earwitnessing: Tropes and Politics of Listening in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry”) examines representations of listening in nineteenth-century poems alongside real-world cultures of Victorian listening. My first book, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry, explores how poetic and translation practices from early Victorian times into the 20th century influenced one another. It was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the best first book in Victorian Studies.
I’m also a translator of Swahili poetry interested in literary translation as a creative practice today. I published a collection of poems by the Tanzanian modernist Euphrase Kezilahabi in English translation, Stray Truths, and I am part of an international collective translating poetry from 19th-century Lamu, on what is today the Kenyan coast. I recently edited an English translation of the poetry collection Sauti ya Dhiki, by the Kenyan poet Abdilatif Abdalla, that was made by the late novelist Ken Walibora Waliaula; and with the help of contributors, I created an edited volume about those poems, titled The Imaginative Vision of Abdilatif Abdalla’s Voice of Agony.
I write and publish poetry and am committed to the practices of poetry-writing and literary translation. My own poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Raritan, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
Teaching Interests
I teach undergraduate courses in 19th-century British literature, including a senior seminar on “The Victorian Supernatural” and electives in Victorian poetry and prose. I have also co-taught, with Professor David Lahti in Biology, a course we designed on “The Literature of Evolution.” I teach English 170W (“Introduction to Literary Studies”), English 241 (“The Text in its Historical Moment”), and 242 (“Literary History”).
In our MA program, I offer courses on 19th-century British poetry, including “The Sounds of Victorian Poetry,” and teach English 701, the required methodology course. In the MFA program I teach “Craft of Translation” and “Workshop in Translation.”
Selected Publications
Books
Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2015).
Selected Poems of Euphrase Kezilahabi, edited and translated by Annmarie Drury (Michigan State UP, 2015).
The Imaginative Vision of Abdilatif Abdalla’s Voice of Agony, edited by Annmarie Drury (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
Edition
The Library Window by Margaret Oliphant, edited by Annmarie Drury (Broadview 2019).
Articles
“Epic Translation and Self-Scrutiny in Imperial Britain,” in A Companion to the Translation of Classical Epic, edited by Richard H. Armstrong and Alexandra Lianeri (Wiley-Blackwell, 2025).
“Shaaban Robert’s Swahili Rubáiyát and its Reckonings,” Modern Philology 121, no. 2 (November 2023): 169-91.
“Searching for Swahili Jane,” in Close Reading a Global Novel Across Languages: Prismatic Jane Eyre, edited by Matthew Reynolds (Open Book, 2023).
“The Long Timeline in Aesthetic Relations: On Working with Abdilatif Abdalla’s Sauti ya Dhiki (‘Voice of Agony’),” in Decolonial Aesthetics II: Modes of Relating, edited by Patrick Oloko, Michaela Ott, Peter Simatei, and Clarissa Vierke. Metzler-Verlag, 2023.
“William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling,” in Victorian Verse: the Poetry of Everyday Life, edited by Lee Behlman and Olivia Moy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
“Aural Community and William Barnes as Earwitness,” Victorian Poetry 56, no. 4 (Winter
2018): 433-53.
