Hannah Loeb

I’m a poet-critic; I write poems, and I write about poems. As a literary scholar, I study the metaphorization of meter as a ghost in supposedly non-metrical modern and contemporary poetry. I’m also a life-long choral singer; at UVA, I perform with UVA’s University and Chamber Singers. A tendency to keep a phantom count of syllables, stresses, or even ticks of a metronome lies beneath much of what I love, and I revere aesthetic experiences that involve a species of controlled flow—grounded in embodied habit or training, perhaps, yet unfettered, unpredictable, mysterious. As a teacher, I look to achieve something analogous: a classroom built on collective rituals of learning, in which students feel secure, known, valued, and trusted…but also a place of surprise, delight, and discovery. I’m excited to teach an Engagements course about aesthetic attention in the age of the algorithm because I’m curious about how existing categorizations of attention that belong to disparate disciplinary modes, from critiques of surveillance capitalism to analyses of devotional verse, might overlap and deepen one another.