Podcast by Modernist Podcast
In this minisode, we talk to Shawna Ross about the intersection of the digital humanities and modernist studies, enjoy!
Panel: Eliza Murphy | University of Tasmania Eliza is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Her research explores the role and representation of parties in interwar literature, investigating the ways in which fictional parties are reflective of historical and cultural contexts. Her work focuses primarily on the novels of E. F. Benson, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, and Evelyn Waugh. Jaime Ellen Church | University of Wolverhampton Jaime is a second year PhD student and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research interests include the entire body of Zelda Fitzgerald’s work and that of her husband. This year she has been teaching on ‘Brief Encounters’, a module analysing the short story’s narrative form. Jaime is also presenting her research at the University of Leed’s New Work in Modernism conference (2017). Edit "Modernist Scandal"
This minisode we sit down with Alana Sayers from the University of Victoria at the Modernist Studies Association to discuss her research, her practice and how we can all do better as scholars.
In this minisode, we talk to Jodie Marley about the natal charts of modernist writers and artists. Enjoy!
Host: Rio Matchett Dr Kiron Ward | University of East Anglia Kiron is a Teaching Fellow in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Sussex. He completed his PhD thesis, Fictional Encyclopaedism in James Joyce, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Robert Bolaño: Towards A Theory of Literary Totality, at the University of Sussex in May 2017. He is the co-editor, with Katherine Da Cunha Lewin (University of Sussex), of Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, which is out with Bloomsbury Academic in October, and, with James Blackwell Phelan (Vanderbilt University), of ‘Encyclopedia Joyce,’ a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly. Kiron is also on the Academic Committee for the 2019 North American James Joyce Conference in Mexico City; the theme is ‘Joyce Without Borders,’ and the Call for Papers can be found at https://www.joycewithoutborders.com/ Dr Helen Saunders | King’s College London Helen is a PhD candidate at King’s College London writing on modernist literature and fashion, with a particular interest in the work of James Joyce. She is a postgraduate representative for the British Association of Modernist Studies and was previously an Administrator at the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London. In addition, Helen is an Editorial Assistant at Bloomsbury. Previously she has worked as a teaching assistant at King’s College London, a private tutor, a bookseller, and as a media analyst. Genevieve Sartor | Trinity College Dublin Genevieve is a PhD Candidate at Trinity College Dublin. She is editor of James Joyce and Genetic Criticism (Brill 2018), and has published or forthcoming articles in the Journal of Modern Literature, the University of Toronto Quarterly, the James Joyce Literary Supplement, Deleuze Studies and The Irish Times.Her current interdisciplinary research concerns a manuscript-based James Joycean critique of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s late seminars. Dr Mark McGahon | Queen’s University, Belfast Mark is a University Tutor at Queen’s University, Belfast. He completed his PhD in 2016 on ‘Acts of Injustice and the Construction of Social Reality in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ and is currently working toward turning this project into a book. This work traces injustices that cannot be made known due to acts of silencing in several chapters of Ulysses. It uses a concept of injustice formulated by the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard whereby dominant social realities silence unwanted perspectives. His article, ‘Silence, Justice, and the Différend in Joyce’s Ulysses’ appeared in ‘Silence in Modern Irish Writing, edited by Michael McAteer in 2017. He has also reviewed extensively, notably in ‘Irish Studies Review’ and ‘James Joyce Quarterly’.
Our fourth minisode. Sean Richardson sits down with illustrator Ella Bucknall to discuss her graphic biography of Virginia Woolf. Keep your eyes peeled for the finished product and find more about Ella at https://www.ellabucknall.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/modernistpodcast
Panel: Laura Lovejoy | University College Dublin Laura completed her PhD at University College Dublin in 2016. Her dissertation explored how a collection of modernist novels published in the 1930s by James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen engaged with ideas of cultural degeneration as they were manifest in the politics of the Irish Free State. Kieron Fairweather | Northumbria University Kieron is in his second year of PhD studies in English Literature at Northumbria University. His research focuses on the works of Jean Rhys and Djuna Barnes and looks to rework practices of flânerie and psychogeography through the scope of affect studies. Matilda Blackwell | University of Birmingham Matilda is in the first year of her PhD in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, funded by the Midlands3Cities doctoral training partnership. Her research focuses on the bathroom as a performative/political/hygienic space in early twentieth- century British literature, particularly as it intersects with themes of queerness and the materiality of the body. Elizabeth O’Connor | University of Birmingham Elizabeth is a third year PhD student at the University of Birmingham, researching the presence and significance of shore imagery in the poetry and prose of H.D. Her research interests are in modern poetry, modernism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism and nature-writing. She is Book Review Editor for the postgraduate research publication The Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language, and her recent publications include ‘”Pushing on Through Transparencies”: H.D.’s Shores and the Creation of New Space’, antae 3.1 (April 2016): 36-46
Our first ever minisode. Sean Richardson sits down with Tilly Blackwell to discuss stress and the academy.
Lillian Hingley | University of Oxford Lillian is a first year DPhil student at the University of Oxford. Supported by the Hertford-Faculty of English DPhil Studentship in Irish Literature, her thesis explores how the modernist writers Ibsen, Joyce and Beckett constitute Theodor Adorno’s critical theory. Beyond her doctorate, she is a TELOSthreads intern for Telos Journal and is currently establishing an Oxford-based critical theory network. Michelle Rada | Brown Michelle is a doctoral candidate in English at Brown University. Her research focuses on turn-of-the-century English, Irish, and Latin American literature and Modernist aesthetics. She is interested in tracing the relationship between turn-of-the-century design and visual culture, psychoanalysis, affect, and the novel as a form through which these discourses are negotiated, diffused, and restructured. Michelle’s dissertation, “Form and Dysfunction,” examines affective, aesthetic, and methodological innovations that the novel mobilizes through form. Each chapter magnifies a novel’s formal structure alongside two separate discourses: psychoanalysis and design theory. She argues that formal experiments in Modernism critique (and shatter) the period’s obsession with function and empirical knowledge. Michelle has published articles in The Journal of Modern Literature, The Comparatist, and Room One-Thousand, and has forthcoming pieces in James Joyce Quarterly and The Journal of Beckett Studies. Daisy Ferris | Nottingham Trent Daisy is a first year PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University. Her research looks at women’s use of humour and parody in modernist magazines. She completed an Mres in English Literary Research in 2017, also at Nottingham Trent University, and was awarded the English Prize, the Michael Klein Prize and the Eland Books Travel Writing Prize for her BA which she completed at the same institution. Her wider research interests include modernist woman’s writing, modernist use of parody, and modernist periodical culture.
Our second ever minisode. Sean Richardson sits down with Rachel Eames to discuss the joy of collaboration within academia.
Noreen Masud | University of Oxford Noreen teaches Victorian and Modern Literature and literary theory across colleges at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, funded by the AHRC, explored how the poetry and prose of Stevie Smith might productively be read as ‘aphoristic’. She has work published or forthcoming on Stevie Smith, M. C. Escher, Sylvia Plath and the theory of the aphorism, and in 2016 she organised the first one-day conference on Stevie Smith, with Dr Frances White. Andrew Seager | University of Dundee Andrew Seager is an AHRC funded PhD student at the University of Dundee. His research is tied to the University’s ‘Alan Sharp Archive’, a collection of manuscripts, unpublished novels, and other documents written by the titular Scottish screenwriter and novelist who passed away in 2013. Andrew’s PhD is titled “To ‘Live Through the Lens: The screenplays and literature of Alan Sharp as transmedial texts’. It explores Sharp’s unique blending of screenwriting and prose forms throughout his body of work, arguing they illustrate the fluid, transmedial properties of the screenplay form, and its unique occupancy in a liminal space between mediums. Andrew graduated with a first class honours degree in English and Film from the University of Dundee’s in 2015, and with a Distinction in from University of Dundee’s Film Studies MLitt in 2017. In both cases he won awards for best overall grades. His research interests include: screenplay criticism, ‘french genetic criticism’, Scottish Modernism, New Hollywood and Queer Theory. Jodie Marley | University of Nottingham Jodie Marley | Jodie is a first year PhD student in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, supervised by Professor James Moran and Dr Matt Green, and funded by the CRLC. Her PhD project focuses on the influence of William Blake’s writings and philosophy on the works of W. B. Yeats, George William Russell (‘A.E.’), and James Stephens. The project focuses in particular on these writers’ reception of Blake as a mystic and visionary and their adaptation of his ideas into their own mystic systems. Ruth Clemens | Leeds Trinity Ruth is a third year stipendiary PhD candidate and visiting lecturer at Leeds Trinity University. Her research undertakes a Deleuze-informed approach to literary paratexts, especially in their use of translation, multilingualism, and the foregrounding of textual and non-textual borders. Her thesis focuses on the work of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hope Mirrlees. As well as her PhD project, Ruth is currently working on English translations of the Dutch modernist Carry van Bruggen. She is a BAMS postgraduate representative, and is currently a visiting research fellow at Utrecht University under the supervision of Rosi Braidotti.
Our first ever minisode. Sean Richardson sits down with Lisa Banks to discuss precarity, strikes and the materiality of being a PhD in the twenty first century.
Matthew Holliday | University of Nottingham Matthew is a first-year doctoral researcher in English Literature at the University of Nottingham, where he is undertaking a revisionist study of Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics through the lens of Impressionism, focusing on grief as it manifests through objects. Born in London, he gained a BA at Southampton Solent (2016) and an MA from the University of Nottingham (2017) before winning an AHRC-funded Midlands3Cities studentship to work under the supervision of Dr Leena Kore-Schroder, Professor Martin Stannard and Dr Gaby Neher. Rosie Reynolds | University of Westminster Rosie is a second year English PhD student at the University of Westminster. She works primarily on Virginia Woolf, with a focus on the role of the aunt and its representation across her writing. She aims to explore the relationship between fictional aunts and their real life counterparts over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a time in which the changing demography of Britain resulted in a proliferation of aunts. As well as studying for her PhD, Rosie works in HE Outreach and is collaborating with various organisations on prisoner education, including a current teaching project at HMP Pentonville. Anna Reus | Leeds Trinity University Anne is a third year PhD Student at Leeds Trinity University. Her thesis examines the representations of nineteenth-century women writers in Virginia Woolf’s journalism, focussing on the influence of Victorian biography and changing definitions of female professionalism. Her research interests also include mid-Victorian sensation and domestic fiction. She was co-organizer of Virginia Woolf and Heritage conference at Leeds Trinity University in 2016 and editor of the Selected Papers on this topic (Clemson UP, 2017), and is on the organizing team for the BAMS postgraduate conference New Work in Modernist Studies 2017.
Panel: Joseph Owen, David Young, Ava Dikova Joseph Owen | University of Southampton Joseph is a first year English PhD student at University of Southampton. His focus is on aesthetics in the work of political theorist Carl Schmitt. He aims to introduce literary modernism into discussions of Schmitt’s thought. David Young | Duqesne University David is a fourth year PhD candidate at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. His dissertation focuses on fascist violence in twentieth century British fiction. He is investigating how this violence is presented as a literary form in narrative. Ava Dikova | University of Essex Ava is a second year PhD candidate at University of Essex. Her thesis develops a modernist concept of personal autonomy and traces its representation in the work of Virginia Woolf.
Panel: Nissa Cannon | University of California, Santa Barbara Nissa is an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Pre-doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is completing her Ph.D. in English. Her dissertation, “Paper Identities and Identity Papers” argues that the documents of interwar itinerancy are responsible for creating a distinct mode of migratory identity: expatriation. She has published on Jean Toomer’s Cane, and has an article forthcoming in symploke on Claude McKay’s Banjo and the modern passport system Bret Johnson | University of Loughborough Bret is a fully-funded researcher at Loughborough University, with an interest in the role of literary prizes, small publishers, and the avant-garde. His work currently looks at literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a focus one Modernism and its legacy within contemporary fiction and combines archival research with oral history interviews. He gained a BA at Goldsmiths (2012) and an MA at the University of Birmingham (2014) before winning a studentship at Loughborough University in 2016 to work under the supervision of Dr Lise Jaillant and Professor Nigel Wood Emma West | University of Birmingham Emma is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her postdoctoral project, Revolutionary Red Tape: How state bureaucracy shaped British modernism, examines how public servants and official committees helped to commission, disseminate and popularise British modernist art, design, architecture and literature. She has published essays on modernism, periodicals, fashion and theory and is the organiser of several conferences, including Alternative Modernisms (2013), A Century On (2015) and Twentieth-Century British Periodicals (2017). She is the Founder and Chair of Modernist Network Cymru (MONC).
Panel: Meindert Peters, Lisa Banks, Julia Sutton-Mattocks, Samraghni Bonnerjee Meindert Peters | University of Oxford Meindert E. Peters is doing a DPhil in German Studies at New College, University of Oxford. His work focuses on the articulations of embodiment in German Modernity. Heidegger’s understanding of the body in Being and Time (1927) shapes the background to his reading of literature (esp. Rilke and Döblin) and dance (esp. Berber and Droste) of the period. Meindert is a former professional ballet dancer and occasionally writes for the Oxonian Review. Lisa Banks | McGill Lisa is a PhD student at McGill University in Monteal, Quebec. Her research deals with questions of illness, aging, and dying in modernist women's writing, while her dissertation will focus on the end-of-life creative output of H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Kay Smith. Julia Sutton-Mattocks | University of Bristol Julia is a SWW DTP-funded PhD student at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, where she is researching the impact of medical advance on Czech- and Russian-language literature and cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s. Her research explores the role medicine played within the widespread project of regeneration that followed the First World War and Russian Revolution, and its interaction with the perceived degeneration of the fin de siècle. She is particularly interested in narratives that investigate aspects of public health. Samraghni Bonnerjee | University of Sheffield Samraghni is a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Sheffield, reading for a PhD in English Literature. For her thesis, she is working on a comparative study of British and German nurses of the First World War. She read English and German at Calcutta, and was twice the Goethe Stipendiatin to Berlin and Hamburg. She is a member of International Society for First World War Studies (ISFWWS), International Network for the History of Hospitals (INHH), UK Association for the History of Nursing (UKAHN) and Centre for Archival Practices, University of Sheffield.
Panel: Jennifer Janechek | University of Iowa Dr. Jennifer Janechek is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Her dissertation and now book project, “‘A Machine to Hear for Them’: Telephony, Modernism, and the Mother Tongue,” traces a new aurality in British literary modernism that emerged in response to contemporary advances in communication engineering, particularly those related to telephony. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, The Conradian, Dickens Studies Annual, The Victorian, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts. She is also the recipient of the Bruce Harkness Young Conrad Scholar Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. Tamara Radak | University of Vienna Tamara Radak is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. She is currently preparing a monograph on anti-closural narratives in the novels of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, titled No(n)Sense of an Ending? Modernist Aporias of Closure. She was the host organiser of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (University of Vienna, 2016) and has published in James Joyce Quarterly, European Joyce Studies, James Joyce Literary Supplement, and the Flann O’Brien-themed The Parish Review. Her most recent essay, forthcoming in Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (Cork UP, 2017), applies hypertext and possible worlds theory to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Leonie Thomas | University of Bristol Leonie Thomas is an AHRC funded PhD student, co-supervised at the Universities of Exeter and Bristol. Her doctoral project, entitled “Wireless Women: Listening-In to Forgotten Female Voices at the BBC, 1922-1955”, explores the influence of a diverse range of female writers on the cultural output of the BBC. She has presented at The Space Between Society’s annual conference in McGill in 2016, as well as at the “Radio Modernisms” conference hosted by the British Library in June 2016. She has a forthcoming article, entitled “Making Waves: Una Marson at the BBC”, in Media History and she has been invited to speak as part of Kings College London’s celebration of the BBC World Service in October 2018.
Panel: Alice Kelly | University of Oxford Dr. Alice Kelly is the Harmsworth Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History of the United States and World War One at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on First World War and modernist literature and culture. She has published a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s 1915 collection of war reportage, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and has recently written on First World War letters, the war writings of Katherine Mansfield, and the American nurse Ellen N. La Motte, in journals and in the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently working on a book on modernism and war commemoration. Molly Hall | University of Rhode Island Molly Hall is a doctoral student and instructor of literature at University of Rhode Island, where she also currently holds a graduate fellowship at The Coastal Institute, and has recently co-organized a public humanities project exploring the relationship between representation and reality of veteran’s homecoming in America from WWI to the Middle East. Her dissertation focuses on the constitutive entanglements of the British national subject in landscape representation within modernist responses to World War I. Titled “Ecological Impacts of World War I: Tracing Temporalities of Brink and Acceleration in British Modernism, 1890-1945,” her project traces the ways in which landscapes of home and war become enmeshed in interwar English literature of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing in particular on the residual romanticisms of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, D.H. Lawrence, and Siegfried Sassoon, as their landscape aesthetics posit a queer materialist historiography, attempting to reground the modern subject in a deracinated homeland. She hopes to suggest that the ethics of modernist aesthetics open up both a dangerous reconfiguration of the relationship between subjectivity, “nature,” and war as well as an opportunity to better understand the modern affective orientation towards the environment in the decades that followed. Hannah Simpson | University of Oxford Hannah Simpson is a DPhil student in English Literature at St. Cross College, University of Oxford. Her dissertation explores the presentation of physical pain and disability in post-WWII theatre and choreography, focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett and Tatsumi Hijikata. She has articles published in Comparative Drama, Warwick Exchanges, and Etudes Irlandaises, and forthcoming the Journal of Modern Literature. She is also currently co-organising a conference entitled “The Human Body and World War II”, to be held at the University of Oxford, March 23rd-24th.
Phoenix Alexander | Yale Phoenix is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the departments of English, African American Studies and WGSS. Before coming to Yale, he trained as a fashion and textile designer at Central Saint Martins, and completed a BA and MA in literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His article ‘Spectacles of Dystopia: Lauren Beukes and the Geopolitics of Digital Space’ was published in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His dissertation is titled Voices with Vision: Writing Black Feminist Futures in Twentieth Century African America. Ryan Weberling | Boston University Ryan is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Boston University, where he is also completing a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation, ‘One World, One Life’: Modernist Fiction and the Politics of Federation, considers how writers such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Salman Rushdie responded to the emergence of liberal federalism as a mode of governance and structure of feeling. Madison Priest | City University New York Madison Priest is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center specializing in 20th century U.S. women’s writing. She is currently at work on her dissertation, “Women We Don’t Want to Be: The Female-Authored Antiheroine in American Modernism.” The project situates this character within an American literary tradition of comingled “brows” and seeks through her to map the landscape of women’s choices during what a Harper’s Weekly Columnist called “feminism’s awkward age.” Paul J Edwards | Boston University Paul J. Edwards is a doctoral candidate in Boston University’s American and New England Studies Program, where he has also completed a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is also the current facilitator for BU’s Critical Pedagogies Forum. Formerly a Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow (2012-2015) and Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) research fellow (2015-2016), he will be a Dissertation Fellow at the Boston University Center for the Humanities in the Spring of 2017. He graduated from Wesleyan University with a bachelor of arts degree with honors in Music with a focus on ethnomusicology and American music history. His work in race and gender consider the ways discourses precede human interaction and often becomes obstacles for human contact. His methodology and analysis synthesize Michel Foucault, Carl Jung, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick to focus on the epistemology and ontology of gender and race. At the heart of this methodology is a concern with how race functions in different contexts especially in the late 19th- and early 20th-century.
Panel: Benedict Jones-Williams, Heather Green, Chris Beausang, Veronika Schuchter Benedict is a first year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh – his doctoral research focuses on the relationship between museums and literature in Europe and North America from 1850 until the present day. He recently graduated with distinction from Edinburgh’s Book History and Material Culture Masters programme, prior to which he studied English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, where he co-founded The Elphinstone Review, an undergraduate journal for the arts and social sciences. He has presented at conferences in Toronto and Leeds, and will soon be giving a paper at the 27th annual Virginia Woolf conference. Heather is a PhD candidate at NTU, researching the interpretation of literary heritage within Nottingham under the supervision of Duncan Grewcock. She completed her MA in Museum and Heritage Development at NTU in 2016, and has worked professionally within libraries and archives since 2009. Chris is a first-year PhD candidate in An Foras Feasa at Maynooth University, working under the supervision of Professor Susan Schreibman. His research investigates the resurgence of modernist aesthetics within the novels of contemporary novelists such as Anne Enright, Eimear McBride, Tom McCarthy and Will Self and involves reaching a definition of literary style through the use of machine learning and the construction of neural networks. Chris received his B.A. in English Studies from Trinity College Dublin in 2014 and his MPhil in Digital Humanities and Culture, also from Trinity, in 2015. He has had fiction published in Gorse, The Galway Review and The Bohemyth. Veronika is a final year PhD student at the University of Innsbruck and a Visiting Scholar at Nottingham Trent University where her doctoral project in the area of contemporary women’s writing is co-supervised. She is particularly interested in feminist and postcolonial theory as well as Canadian literature and women’s writing. She is steering group member of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network (PG CWWN) and on the executive committee of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (FWSA).
Panel: Lloyd Houston, Megan Girdwood Megan is a third year PhD student in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her thesis explores the place of the modernist dancer in performance, focusing on the legacy of Salome in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century drama and choreography. She has published work in the Journal of Religion & Film and the Irish Studies Review, and will participate in the discussion panel of the upcoming Modernist Podcast episode on Queer Modernism. Lloyd is the Hertford College – Faculty of English DPhil Scholar in Irish Literature in English at the University of Oxford. His work explores the politicised role of venereal disease and discourses of sexual hygiene in Irish modernism. His recent publications include a history of the Bodleian’s restricted ‘Phi’ Collection and a reception study of Joyce’s Ulysses in Britain’s copyright libraries.
Panel: Matthew Holman, Gabby Fletcher, Rachel Eames, Anna Girling Matthew is a PhD student at University College London. He works on late modernism (1955-65) and on the transatlantic avant-garde. His research focuses on the poet and curator Frank O’Hara, and on his relationships and collaborations with European gestural art. Gaby is a first year PhD candidate at the National University of Ireland, Galway and is a recipient of the Hardiman Research Scholarship. Her research draws together the writers Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein to consider how their writing responds to the articulation of female identity found in American social reform campaigns. Rachel is in the first year of her Midlands3Cities funded PhD in English at the University of Birmingham. She is working on the relationship between early 20th Century physics, literature and culture, looking particularly at the ways physics was experienced and adopted by Modernist poets. Anna is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis looks at the American writer, Edith Wharton, and at her ambivalent engagement with modernity. More broadly, Anna is interested in the transatlantic culture of the interwar period, and in the relation of gender, sexuality and race to representations of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism – particularly in non-canonical (and middlebrow) texts. Her work on Edith Wharton has been published in the Edith Wharton Review and the Times Literary Supplement.
Panel: Ted Howell, Rachel Murray, Peter Adkins Ted is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Temple University completing a dissertation on modernist fiction, early ecology, and the Anthropocene. His work brings literary history into interdisciplinary conversations about the Anthropocene, and through studies of works by E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, illustrates how consistently modernist fiction leverages environmental ideologies and how widely literature shapes cultural and scientific attitudes towards nature Peter is a CHASE PhD candidate at the University of Kent, where he is writing a thesis that re-examines modernist prose aesthetics in relation to questions of the Anthropocene and the nonhuman. The three key figures in his study are James Joyce, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf. He is also a member of the Kent Animal Humanities Network Rachel is a third year AHRC funded PhD candidate at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter. Her thesis examines the relationship between modernist aesthetics, insects, and the figure of the exoskeleton, with a particular focus on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D. and Samuel Beckett
Panel: Rio Matchett, Katie Dyson, Fran Bigman, Sophie Oliver, Jade French Rio is a first year Doctoral candidate at the University of Liverpool, and a freelance theatre director. Her research focuses on women in the world of modernist little magazines, and her theatre work strives to give platform to voices that aren’t always lifted up, to tell their own stories in a beautiful and brave way. Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate at Loyola University Chicago. Her dissertation explores the relationship between narrative form and ethics in modernist works from Virginia Woolf to Nathanael West. In her spare time as a freelance writer, she writes about television and pop culture. Fran Bigman is a visiting researcher at Keio University. In 2015, Fran received her PhD from the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge for a thesis that explores abortion in British literature and film from 1907 to 1967, a topic she has discussed in the TLS and on BBC Women’s Hour. From September 2015 to March 2016, she was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in History from Brown University and a MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge. She is now working on infertility narratives as well as a documentary about abortion on screen, so if you have suggestions for either, send them her way! Sophie Oliver is in the final months of a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also teaches. Her thesis looks at female modernists and fashion – their writing about fashion and the ways in which their writing was subject to fashions. Her work on the subject has been published in a Literature Compass and Modernist Cultures, and she recently curated a small exhibition about Jean Rhys at the British Library. Jade is a first-year PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research explores the female ageing process in modernist texts, with a specific focus on the late works of H.D, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Jean Rhys. She edited the book Let’s Start a Pussy Riot (2013) and is also a freelance writer and founder of the London-based arts collective Not So Popular.
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
