Miles Osgood

Bio

Miles Osgood is a Lecturer for English, Structured Liberal Education (SLE), and Continuing Studies. After working at Oxford University Press in New York, Miles earned a PhD in English at Harvard. He has published public essays in Slate, n+1, and the Washington Post, along with academic articles in Modernism/modernity and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. Through his research on the Olympics and the arts, he's recently been interviewed in print in The New York Times and The Architectural Review, and on the air on Very Special Episodes and NBC Bay Area.

Miles is at work on a book entitled "Poet, Painter, Sprinter, Spy," which documents the history of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad in Mexico City against the backdrop of Cold War espionage and global unrest. This work extends his dissertation research, which uncovers the little-known history of the Olympic Art Competitions of 1912-1948 and argues that twentieth-century world literature self-consciously adopted the qualities of international sport. Across studies of Olympic participants including Robert Graves, Jean Cocteau, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Bunya Koh, and through analysis of sport in the work of H.D., Ralph Ellison, Marianne Moore, and Kamau Brathwaite, Miles's published work reveals the surprisingly pervasive genre of "athletic art" across major axes of twentieth-century culture. He also recently contributed to the Fitzwilliam Museum's "Paris 1924" exhibition as an academic consultant.

At Stanford, Miles has taught for SLE since 2019, where he lectures regularly on the avant-garde and Virginia Woolf. He is now also teaching two courses for Stanford English: "Storytelling and Mythmaking: Modern Odysseys," a class that combines classics, contemporary literature, and creative writing; and "Modernism and its Manifestos," a survey of literary monuments and their explanatory essays from the 1910s to the 1930s. He also gives lectures in Continuing Studies with "Shell-Shock: The World Wars in Literature, Art, and Film," a gateway course for the Master of Liberal Arts program. Previously, at Harvard, he designed courses on world literature for edX, on James Joyce's Ulysses for Wintersession, and on women's literature & global short fiction for the Junior Tutorial program.

In his spare time, Miles designs board games, edits home movies, and hikes around San Francisco with his dog Pico.

Academic Appointments

• Lecturer, Stanford Introductory Studies