About Me

David-Antoine Williams
[a CV is here]

I’m an Assistant Professor of English at St Jerome’s University, in the University of Waterloo. I teach courses in poetry, criticism, and British and Irish literature from roughly 1800 to today. My research is mainly on poetry, mainly of the contemporary period, and mainly of the UK and Ireland. This site is a way of opening up some of my ongoing and early-stage research for public consideration and comment.

Before moving to St Jerome’s and UW, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Faculty at Oxford University, and a Junior Research Fellow in English at Hertford College, Oxford. That’s where I did much of the revision on my first book, Defending Poetry. These fellowships also allowed me to start work on poetry and dictionaries, and poetry and etymology, which has led directly to my current ongoing work.

I did my graduate work on British and Irish poetry in the UK, first at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, and then at Balliol College, Oxford. While at Balliol I lived at Holywell Manor, which is a great place to write a DPhil.

Long ago, I was an undergraduate at Harvard University, living in Quincy House for three of four years there, and before that I was born and grew up in Montreal, QC.

This last, first fact may help contextualize the fact that I now reside in Toronto, ON.