David Williams

David-Antoine Williams is Associate Professor of English at St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, with research interests in modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry. Originally from Montreal, he was educated at Harvard University, the University of St Andrews, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate. Williams is the author of a monograph, Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill (Oxford University Press: 2010); as well as articles on “Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux”; “Poetic Antagonyms”; “Method as Tautology in the Digital Humanities”; and “Brodsky, Levinas, and the Ethics of Poetry.” For some time he maintained a research blog called “Poetry & Contingency” (http://poetry-contingency.uwaterloo.ca). His current project, “The Life of Words,” (http://thelifeofwords.uwaterloo.ca) investigates exchanges between poetry and lexicography, including the Oxford English Dictionary, in the modern period.