Stefania Heim, PhD

She/her, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor

About

Pronunciation: Stefania: Ste-FAH-nya, Heim: Sounds like "time"

Stefania Heim is a scholar, translator, poet, editor, and educator committed to the intersections between those pursuits. Her teaching and academic work focus on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics and translation studies. Her scholarly essays—on topics including 20th century poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser; genre-challenging poet and thinker Susan Howe; and Walt Whitman’s treatment of war, death, and amputation—have appeared in venues including The Journal of Modern Literature, Textual Practice, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive. With Catherine Gander she is currently editing Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser, a creative-critical volume on the writer’s contemporary relevance, featuring some of the most innovative and socially engaged poets writing today.

For her work on metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, Stefania received a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and funding to participate in the ViceVersa Italian-English Translation workshop at Villa Garbald, Switzerland. She is translator of Geometry of Shadows: Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian Poems (A Public Space Books 2019) and de Chirico's posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron (A Public Space Books 2024).

Stefania is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback 2014), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Gatewood Prize, and HOUR BOOK (Ahsahta 2019), chosen by Jennifer Moxley for the Sawtooth Prize. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Interno Poesia (alongside translations into Italian by Stefania Zampiga), Provincetown Arts, Oversound, Hambone, Harvard Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. She is a former poetry editor at Boston Review and co-founder with Jennifer Kronovet of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation.

Research Interests

  • Poetry
  • Poetics
  • Modernism
  • American Literature
  • Documentary Literature
  • Translation
  • Multilingual Writing
  • Experimental Writing
  • Art & Activism
  • Interdisciplinary Literature