J.T. Welsch

Research

2012-06-17 15.38.05

My research is broadly concerned with contemporary literature and the creative industries. I’m especially interested in the ways that creative work is produced and consumed, economic and social structures around creativity, and the ethics of creative labour.

Book Projects

  • The Poetry of Suicide: Learning to Read a Difficult Death (Manchester University Press, 2026) – a trade nonfiction book weaving together a history of poets’ suicides and a history of suicide in my own family.
  • The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry (Anthem, 2020) – an academic monograph that examines publishing, prize culture, new technologies, and changing language around professionalisation and poetic labour since 2008.
  • Wretched Strangers: Borders Movement Homes (Boiler House Press, 2018) – an anthology exploring the poetry of migration in post-Brexit Britain, co-edited with Ágnes Lehóczky.

Current Projects

  • Unsexy Art: A new project exploring the relationship between creativity and sexuality in different art forms.
  • The Poetry of Suicide: A research project I’ve been working on for the past five years, exploring the lives and work of twentieth-century poets who died by suicide alongside a long history of suicide in my own family.
  • Mapping UK Poetry Infrastructure, 2000-2025: An ongoing project in collaboration with Prof John McAuliffe (Manchester) and Dr Lucy Burns (Liverpool John Moores) with the aim of mapping poetry resources and activities, in order to understand the relationship between different publishing, academic, and community organisations and initiatives.
  • Thin Ice Press: with Prof Helen Smith, I created a new letterpress studio at the University of York, which includes a number of historic iron and platen presses and a newly-built replica 18th-century wooden common press. Thin Ice Press prints broadsides, cards, and other ephemera, and are currently putting together our first books. This will include Flora & Fauna, a limited edition poetry collection, with linocuts by Joanna Lisowiec, which I’ve been designing and (slowly) typesetting.
  • How Many Loves: Three Artists at Work, a book of creative-critical sequences examining creative labour through the lives and work of late-19th-century painters: James McNeil Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Harriet Backer.
  • See the Music page for my ongoing ‘Poem Songs‘ project.

Recent Talks

  • ‘”Under Everchanging Forms”: James Joyce in the Age of the Multi-Passionate Creative’ (International James Joyce Symposium, University of Glasgow, June 2024).
  • ‘How could I possibly be here, I wonder: thoughts on Elizabeth Bishop’s (un)knowable self’ (Elizabeth Bishop Symposium, Rothemere American Institute, Oxford University, June 2022).
  • ‘Let It Be Forgotten: Sara Teasdale and the Memory of Suicide’ (Modernist Memories 1922-2022, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, March 2022).
  • ‘Is Mentoring Fair?’ (Poetry & Mentoring Symposium, Southampton University, September 2021).
  • ‘Whitman and the Invention of the Modern Poetry Collection’ (Whitman 200 conference, University of Bolton, May 2019).
  • ‘Poetry as Content: The Network Value of Lyrical Thought’ (Poetry and the Essay, University of Wellington, NZ, December 2017).
  • ‘Making Words Work: Employability in English and Creative Writing’ (English Shared Futures, Newcastle, July 2017).
  • ‘Miraculously Multiplied: Ball Poems & Self-Loss’ (Poetry and Psychoanalysis conference, Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, June 2017).
  • ‘Not a Morose Type: The Windsor Font in Annie Hall‘ (Remembering Annie Hall conference, University of Sheffield, May 2017).
  • ‘Delighted & Humbled: The Poet as Entrepreneur’ (Contemporary Poetry: Thinking and Feeling, Plymouth University, May 2016).

Some Publications