Concerned with notions of the lyric I, lyric temporality, and lyric thinking, Trevin is writing a cross-cultural, cross-temporal dissertation on the poetics of Petrarch and Walt Whitman.  He engages with various theories of the lyric that address the relationship between desire and lyric production.

He has presented papers for the Emily Dickinson International Society, the American Comparative Literature Association, the British Comparative Literature Association, and the American Literature Association.  He believes deeply in the value of public scholarship and has worked closely with the Office of Public Scholarship here at WashU.  He has also published a short article on Whitman’s photographic self-image for The Conversation as well as a piece on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy for the Pittsburgh Review of Books.  He is currently a Heartland Journalism Fellow.