Professor Mark Ford

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 Email: m.ford@ucl.ac.uk

External phone: 020 7679 3129
Internal phone: 33129 

Education and Experience

Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi, Kenya. He went to school in London. He has a BA and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. In the academic year 1983-84 he was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University, and from 1991 to 1993 a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Kyoto in Japan. He has published three collections of poetry, Landlocked (1991), Soft Sift (2001), and Six Children (2011). He has also published a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel, and a parallel text edition of Roussel’s final poem, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (New Impressions of Africa). He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and a selection of his reviews and essays have been published in two volumes, A Driftwood Altar (2005) and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011). He is currently editing an anthology of the poetry of London for Harvard University Press.

Research

Mark Ford has published widely on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century British, American, and French literature. He is particularly interested in the work of the New York School of poets, and has recently published editions of the poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. He is also interested in French literature, and is the leading Anglophone expert on the work of Raymond Roussel. Subjects of recent essays by Mark Ford include Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Nicholas Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Georges Perec, and Javier Marìas. He is one of the literary executors of the poet Mick Imlah, and has recently edited a volume of Imlah's Selected Poems for Faber & Faber.

Mark Ford's publications and research interests nearly all relate to the Department's three principal literary fields: the City, Editions, and Life Stories. The City: He has a great interest in New York-based poets from the advent of modernism to the present day, and in the interface between New York and Parisian culture throughout this period. Editions: His publications include editions of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. Life Stories: He is the author of the first full-length biography in English of the French poet, playwright, and novelist, Raymond Roussel.

Selected Publications

Books

Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992, rpt. 1998)

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber & Faber, 2000, Cornell University Press, 2001)

Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001, Harcourt 2003)

A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews (Waywiser, 2005)

Six Children (Faber & Faber, 2011)

Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (Peter Lang, 2011)

Edited Books

No Name by Wilkie Collins (Penguin Classics, 1994)

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics, 1999)

‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ and other poems by Frank O’Hara (Carcanet, 2003)

Something We Have That They Don’t: British & American Poetic Relations Since 1925, co-edited with Steve Clark (University of Iowa Press, 2004)

The New York Poets: An Anthology (Carcanet, 2004)

The New York Poets II: An Anthology, co-edited with Trevor Winkfield, (Carcanet, 2006)

Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems (Knopf, 2008)

Allen Ginsberg: Poems Selected by Mark Ford (Faber & Faber Poet-on-Poets series, 2008)

John Ashbery: Collected Poems, Vol. 1, 1944-1990 (Library of America, 2008)

New Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel (Facing Pages Series, Princeton University Press, 2011)