John Melillo

John Melillo received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University. He was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at the University of Arizona from the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2013. His book, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk (Bloomsbury Sound Studies 2020), examines the production of noise in poetry through the twentieth century. He has written and presented work on experimental poetry, representations of waves, punk music, World War I poets, folk-song utopianism, and other matters of sound and sense. His current book project is a study of mid-twentieth-century sound poetry. With Dr. Johanna Skibsrud, he is collaborating on a study in eco-poesis, The Oyster Project.

Melillo’s teaching and research interests include American and British modernist and contemporary poetry, sound studies, poetics and theory, music and literature, experimental media, war culture, and eco-poetics. In addition to his research in sound, language, and the environment, he performs noise/music as Algae & Tentacles.