Edward Allen is a Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ's College. As well as teaching at the Institute of Continuing Education for the Undergraduate Certificate in English and the Undergraduate Diploma in English, he has also held visiting fellowships at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.
His teaching is text-based - which is to say, his classes revolve around close reading - but he is also keen to think with and through other kinds of media, including sound recordings and films. While his classes tend to proceed by discussion, then, they also involve a good deal of looking and listening. These are the skills that students are likely to take away with them at the end of a course.
By and large, his work centres on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and on poetry, in particular, with special interests in material culture and sound technology. Most of his published research to date has shown an interest in the mediation of printed and spoken voice, including articles on contemporary lyric poetics, and the textuality of typewriting. For more information on his research, teaching and publications, see his Faculty profile.