Daniel Owen is a graduate student in UC Berkeley's South & Southeast Asian Studies MA/Ph.D. program with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His work largely focuses on Indonesian poetry and poetics from the 1960s to the present and poetry's entanglements with social change throughout this period. His master's thesis reads figurations of time in Afrizal Malna's 2020 autobiographical poetry collection Prometheus Pinball in concert with Walter Benjamin's writings on history to investigate the poetics and politics of remembrance and relation that this encounter provokes. Additional research interests include Indonesian histories; critical racial and ethnic studies; time; dailyness; modalities of resistance, refusal, undoing, and endurance; music; and translation studies. Daniel also edits and designs books and participates in various processes as part of Brooklyn-based nonprofit publisher Ugly Duckling Presse's editorial collective. Publications of his poetry include Points of Amperture, Up in the Empty Ferries, Celingak-Celinguk, Restaurant Samsara, and Toot Sweet, and his translations from Indonesian include Afrizal Malna's Document Shredding Museum and various poems by Malna and Farhanah that have been published online and in print journals.
