Rate My Professor Jeff Dolven

Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He offers undergraduate courses including Poetry and the Arts, the Humanities Sequence, lectures on Shakespeare and early English literature, and seminars on Edmund Spenser's poetry, the theory and praxis of the human voice, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, and poetry and belief through Princeton's Prison Teaching Initiative at East Jersey State Prison. His graduate seminars cover Shakespeare's language, sixteenth-century lyric, Renaissance romance, and collaborative topics such as Critique and Its Discontents, Style and Rule, Experience, The Poetics of History, and New Schools. Dolven earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University in 1990, a BA in English from Oxford University in 1993 as a Rhodes Scholar, and a PhD in English from Yale University in 2000. His career began as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University from 2000 to 2001. At Princeton, he advanced from Assistant Professor (2001-2007) to Associate Professor (2007-2016) and Professor of English since 2016, holding the Donald A. Stauffer Bicentennial Preceptorship (2004-2007) and serving as Behrman Professor of the Humanities from 2016 to 2019.