James Belflower

James Belflower is a multidisciplinary artist and poet, and Teaching Professor at Siena College. His work investigates how language mingles us with matter. He is the coauthor of the graphic novel HIST (Calamari Press 2022), and the multimedia text Canyons (Flimb Press 2016) with Matthew Klane; The Posture of Contour (Spring Gun Press 2013); and Commuter (Instance Press, 2009). His work appears, or is forthcoming, in Somatechnics, Postmodern Culture, Capacities To, Diagram, and Sleeping Fish, among others.

My Siena Experience

My Teaching Philosophy

My pedagogy is guided by two overarching principles. The first is deep listening, the practice of understanding another’s perspective. The second is the poet and scholar Joel Bettridge’s assertion that belief, faith, and language-attuned critical inquiry share an epistemology, one concerned with making meaning in the absence of certainty. Underpinned by my formal training in Team-Based and Cooperative learning techniques, my pedagogy focuses on teaching students that meaning making is a constructive communal act, supported by faith that a community earnestly engaged in critical inquiry and attentive to other perspectives may arrive at shared understanding

My Professional Experience

Current Research

The same deep listening and language-oriented inquiry that shape my pedagogy also guide my scholarly and creative development. In my scholarly work I primarily research and write about post-1945 poetry and poetics through the lenses of Affect theory and New Materialist concepts. Specially, I focus on matter’s agential capacity in countercultural and avantgarde poetries. In my creative work, I employ visual art, sound, and poetry to creatively reorient perception toward the complex expressions of agency outside the human. Increasingly I am drawing on my degree in music composition to incorporate resources from the field of Sound Studies to research intersections between poetry, material agency, and sound.

Articles & Book Reviews

• The Unsettled Surface of the Document: Seams, Erosion, and After-images in Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust
  Postmodern Culture, vol. 28
  2018

Awards & Distinctions

• Faculty Development Grant
  Category: Teaching-Research
  COTFD, 2024
• Curriculum Diversity Fellowship
  Category: Teaching-Research
  Diversity Action Committee, 2023
• Diversity Action Grant
  Category: Service-Professional
  Diversity Action Committee, 2020

Books & Book Chapters

• Hist
  Calamari Press
  2022
• Canyons
  Flim Forum Press
  2016
• The Posture of Contour | A Public Primer
  SpringGun Press
  2013
• Bird Leaves the Cornice
  SpringGun Press
  2011
• Commuter
  Instance Press
  2009
• And Also a Fountain
  
  2008