Hannah took up her post at New College in 2012. She received her PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard in 2008 and, before coming to Oxford, she was an Assistant Professor in the English department at Stanford University. She also has a degree in Classics from Trinity College, Cambridge, and an MRes in Cultural Studies from the London Consortium.

Teaching

In college, Hannah teaches English literature from romanticism to the present. She is interested in supervising third-year dissertations on modernist poetry and prose, and the history or theory of verse form. She enjoys mentoring students with an interest in creative writing, particularly poetry. 

Research Interests

Hannah’s research interests are in two main areas: modernism and theories of modernism, and various issues in literary stylistics, including textual genesis, revision, prosody, and the history and ideology of poetic form. She has also done some work on the classical tradition in English, on electronic texts and books, and on theories of authorship.

She is also a poet and has published two collections under Faber. A recording of Hannah reading some of her poems is available via the Poetry Archive.

Selected publications

• The Work of Revision (Harvard, 2013)
  • Awarded the 2014 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy, and the 2015 University English Prize for a first book.
• 'Why Do Authors Produce Textual Variation on Purpose?' Variants 12-13 (2016), 77-103.
• 'The Lyric Turn and Free Verse: Experiments in Poetic Form,' Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern. Eds. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Oxford, 2016).
• 'Still Doing it by Hand,' in Rachel Galvin and Bonnie Costello eds., Auden at Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
• 'Autobiography and the Problem of Finish,' Biography 34.2 (2011): 298-325.
• 'Classics' in Jason Harding ed., T. S. Eliot in Context (Cambridge, 2011): 169-79.
• Poems in magazines including Arete, Poetry Quarterly, The Houston Literary Review, Magma, The Rialto, Envoi, The Guardian Unlimited, Leviathan, Poetry Wales, Prop Magazine, P. N. Review, Stand, and Reactions.
• Was It for This (London: Faber and Faber, 2023; New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2023). Forthcoming in French from La Table Ronde. 
  • Hannah Sullivan: the bard of millennials and Gen Z
  • Was It For This by Hannah Sullivan review – a poem for Grenfell
  • Was It for This (article from The Poetry Foundation)
  • I wanted all of it again: Poetry as memoir of modernity
• Three Poems (London: Faber and Faber 2018; New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020). A French edition translated by Patrick Hersant was published by La Table Ronde in 2020. 
  • Awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the John Pollard International Prize for a first collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, the Ted Hughes Award and the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize.
  • Review of Three Poems from the NY Times
  • A New York Minute - review of Three Poems
  • 'Spurious, Glorious Lavinia Greenlaw' from the London Review of Books
  • 'On Long Poems: Four recent books make length a virtue' from the Yale Review
  • Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan – review from The Guardian
• 'How Yeats Learned to Scan', Yeats's Legacies: Yeats Annual 21 (2018), 3-38.