ZOE BURSZTAJN-ILLINGWORTH
Curriculum Vitae
Department of English | University of Texas at Austin
204 W 21st Street | Austin, TX 78712 | zbi@utexas.edu | 617-308-7090
Updated August, 2022
Education
2022
Ph.D. Department of English, University of Texas at Austin
Dissertation Title: Shooting Script: Poetry, Film, and Form
Committee: Chad Bennett (Co-Chair), Donna Kornhaber (Co-Chair), Tanya Clement, Eugenie Brinkema (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Literature)
2018
M.A. Department of English, University of Texas at Austin
2013
B.A. in English Literature, Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Publications
In progress
Shooting Script: Poetry, Film, and Form (book project)
Shooting Script uses a collaborative formalist method to examine the enmeshed forms and theoretical investments of hyper-contemporary narrative film and poetry. In the process of analysis, Shooting Script addresses questions of ethics, feminism, affect, and environmentalism. Shooting Script argues that contemporary narrative cinema and poetry are overlooked sister arts, connected by their shared theoretical investments in voice, genre, temporality, boundedness, and challenges to a white masculinized modernism. Shooting Script also contends that the simultaneous streaming release of many of these poetry-savvy narrative films constitutes a medium-agnostic “platformalism” that challenges the entrenched concept of form as medium-specific. Films and poets examined in Shooting Script include I’m Thinking of Ending Things (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2020), Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2021), The Kindergarten Teacher (dir. Sara Colangelo, 2018), Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016), and poetry by Ocean Vuong, Dorothea Lasky, Frank Bidart, Eva H.D., and Srikanth Reddy.
2023
“Filming the Elegy: Elegiac Horror in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story,” Literature/Film Quarterly. July 2023. (Peer Reviewed)
In progress
“The Medium Close Poetics of C.D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation.”
C.D. Wright in Context Cluster. Edited by Alicia Wright. Contemporaries at Post45. Abstract accepted. Manuscript in preparation.
2021
“Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it:” Whitmanic Currents and Complications in He Got Game and “I, Too.”
Next Generation Adaptation. Edited by Allen Redmon. The University Press of Mississippi. 90-107. (Invited and Peer Reviewed)
2020
Review of Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste by Maite Zubiaurre.
Vanderbilt University Press, 2019. E3W Review of Books. Infrastructure in the Aftermath of Colonialism. Vol. 20. Spring 2020.
Digital Humanities Projects
The Virtual Poem Embodied on Screen (in progress)
Why preserve poetry readings on film and in video recordings if poetry is largely an aural medium? What do we gain by seeing a poet read her work on screen or potentially lose? To answer these questions, this project examines online archives of audiovisual recordings of poetry performances from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, James Madison University’s Furious Flower Archive, The Library of Congress, SpokenWeb, and PBS Television. I use Alan Grossman’s theory of the virtual poem, and its recent reception by Ben Lerner and Langdon Hammer to discuss how on-screen performances may make this “virtual poem” legible through embodiment. In doing so, I will create a digital edition of “The Virtual Poem Embodied on Screen” that compares audio and video recordings through annotation on the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow and ultimately prepare a manuscript based on my findings for a journal in digital humanities.
SpokenWeb Digital Anthology (in progress)
This year I will serve as editor for a digital anthology of annotated literary audio recordings created by members of SpokenWeb. SpokenWeb is a SSHRC-funded online consortium of Canadian universities (Concordia, SFU, UBC) invested in preservation, access, and community building around literary audio recordings housed at partner institutions. As editor, I place these annotated recordings in context and in dialogue with another, supervise a graduate research assistant working on the project, teach workshops to anthology participants on how to annotate audio recordings using Audacity and the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow, and create an original and exciting CFA (Call for Annotations) for the SpokenWeb consortium.
AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow
As a graduate research assistant for Dr. Tanya Clement, I used my dissertation chapter “Right Voice, Wrong Body: The Kindergarten Teacher, Poetic Address, and Voice as Possession” as a video research use case for Dr. Clement’s collaboration with Brumfield Labs on the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow, which allows scholars to display and curate their annotations of audiovisual artifacts, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. My annotations of clips from Sara Colangelo’s film The Kindergarten Teacher and writing about audiovisual digital annotation practices can be found here: https://zillingworth.github.io/the-kindergarten-teacher-poetry/ I presented this project at the Association for Computers and the Humanities Conference in 2021.
Relineator
The Relineator is a web-app I invented and project managed during my flash fellowship at the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT Austin; the web-app helps teach enjambment’s rhythmic and hermeneutic effects in free verse poetry and re-lineates texts for creative purposes, built in React by Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, May 2020. https://online.dwrl.utexas.edu/relineator/index.html#
Teaching Experience
2020-2021
Assistant Instructor
Literature and Film: Form, Medium, and Politics, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin
2019-2020
Assistant Instructor
Rhetoric of Documentary Films, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin
2018-2019
Assistant Instructor
First Year Writing, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin
Fall 2017
Teaching Assistant
Literature and Film, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin
2016-2018
Teaching Assistant
American Literature Survey, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin
Academic Appointments
2022-2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Department of English, The University of Texas at Austin.
2021-2022 William S. Livingston Graduate Fellow (a competitive, university wide research Fellowship for graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin)
2020-2021 Graduate Research Assistant for Dr. Tanya Clement
2018-2020 Digital Learning Specialist, Digital Writing and Research Lab, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin.
Honors and Awards
2021 Orville Wendell O'Neal Memorial Endowed Scholarship in English from the University of Texas at Austin (merit award)
2019 Travel Award from The English Institute
2017 Travel Award from the Literature and Film Association
2013 Graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College
Conferences and Presentations
“How to Recognize a Poetic Film When You See One: Towards a Collaborative (Plat)formalism in Nomadland,” Rethinking Literary Forms in Cinema. Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2023. Denver, CO, upcoming April 2023.
“Lyric Time and the Virtual Archive in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” Twenty First Century Forms. Modern Language Association Annual Conference 2023. San Francisco, CA, January 2023.
“Filming the Elegy as History of the American West: David Lowery’s A Ghost Story.” Elegy, Ecology, Emergence. Modern Language Association Annual Conference 2022. Washington D.C. January 2022.
“AudiAnnotate for Increasing Access to Historical Audiovisual Collections,” Association for Computers and the Humanities Annual Conference. Virtual. July 2021.
Presentation on Film Studies and the English PhD. Texas A&M Honors Society. Virtual 2021 English Awards Ceremony. Invited by Dr. Allen Redmon. April 2021.
“Relineator Workshop on Enjambment.” Invited Zoom Lecture and Workshop for E314: Reading Poetry. The University of Texas at Austin. October 2020.
“Beyond the Line: Re-thinking Affect and Montage Form in Anglophone Poetry,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference 2020. Chicago, Illinois. Paper Accepted; Conference Cancelled due to COVID-19. March 2020.
Poets & Scholars Reading: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Travis Lau, Johann Sarna, University of Texas at Austin, March 2019.
““[R]andom [R]hyming:” The Pleasure of Attention and Memory in Bernadette’s Mayer’s Midwinter Day,” With Pleasure: Reconsidering Pleasure’s Role in the Humanities. Rice University English Graduate Conference; Houston, Texas; February 2019.
“Whitmanic Currents and Complications in Spike Lee's He Got Game,” Presented at the Literature/Film Association Annual Conference 2017: Politics, Ethics, and Adaptation. University of Montana, Missoula. October, 2017.
“The Divergent Poetics of Abstraction in Coleridge's ‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’ and Stevens's ‘Domination of Black.’” Gothic Poetry: Graduate Conference, University of Texas at Austin. May 2016.
Professional Service
November 2019 Conference Assistant, Historical Poetics Now Conference, University of Texas at Austin.
Relevant Employment
Summer 2015 Intern in editing and copy writing at Copper Canyon Press. Port Townsend, Washington.
2013-2014 English Language Teaching Assistant, North American Language and Cultural Assistants Program, The Education Office of the Embassy of Spain. Parla, Spain.
Professional Affiliations
Modern Language Association
Society of Cinema and Media Studies
Association for Computers and the Humanities
American Comparative Literature Association
Literature and Film Association
Languages
English (native)
Spanish (fluent)
French (competent)
Professional References
Donna Kornhaber
Professor, Department of English, UT Austin
Tanya Clement
Associate Professor, Department of English, UT Austin
Chad Bennett
Associate Professor, Department of English, UT Austin