Antarctica Direct: Fly the Drake Passage

Michael Thurston is the Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 2000. He is the author of Making Something Happen: American Political Poets between the World Wars, The Underworld Descent in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott, and (with Nigel Alderman) Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry. He has published numerous essays on modern poetry and modernist writing, including three on Ernest Hemingway. He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises and is writing the Cambridge Introduction to Ernest Hemingway. With the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is also working on a book on the Harvard literary scholar, F.O. Matthiessen. From 2019 to 2024 he served as the provost and dean of faculty at Smith.