Professor
English Department, St. John's Liberal Arts and Sciences
St. John Hall, Room B40-2
Queens campus
(718) 990-5631
lowneyj@stjohns.edu
Education
Ph.D., 1991, Brown University, English and American
Literature
M.A., 1986, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, English and
American Literature
B.A., 1979, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, English and
American Literature
Profile
John Lowney is a Professor and the Director of English
Graduate Studies at St. John’s. Since joining the faculty of
St. John’s in 1996, he has taught undergraduate and graduate
courses in twentieth-century American and African American literary
and cultural studies, including American poetry, modernism and
postmodernism, American literature and culture of the 1930s, and
the Harlem Renaissance. He is the author of two books
on twentieth-century American poetry: The American Avant-Garde
Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and
the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell University Press,
1997) and History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern
American Poetry, 1935-1968 (University of Iowa Press,
2006). Each of these books addresses the cultural politics of
how modernism has been constructed in U.S. literary history.
He has also been the recipient of grants such as the Donald C.
Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at the Beinecke Library
(Yale University) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study
Grant. He is currently pursuing research on jazz,
internationalism, and African American modernism.