Welcome to the professional homepage for Billy M. Hall, Early Modern Center Fellow and PhD candidate at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Billy Hall received his BA in English and philosophy and MA in English from Brigham Young University. He is currently the 2009-2010 Early Modern Center Fellow and PhD candidate in the department of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. His professional interests include eighteenth-century poetry and poetics, Enlightenment studies, philosophy of technology, Media studies, and the history of aesthetics. Nearly complete, his dissertation The Enlightenment Engine: Aesthetic Technology and the Production of Poetic Knowledge in British poetry 1740-1800 attempts to revive the notion of the poem as techné by reading the eighteenth-century concept of “pure poetry” against the “Romanticizing” tendency of its interpreters to conscript it into a poiesis model of poetry. Drawing on theories of Enlightenment, literary theory, and Visual and Media studies, Enlightenment Engine engages mid-eighteenth-century poetry to argue that the fusion of human and nonhuman, artist and machine invigorates the conceptual dynamics of techné and poiesis and critically reflects on the technology of poetry in the Enlightenment and beyond.