Historicizing Modernism / Modernist Archives

A conference in the University of York
17-19 May 2018
Venue: Norwegian Study Centre, Quantum House, YO10 5BR
Organisers: Prof. Erik Tonning, Prof. Matthew Feldman, Dr David Tucker, Ms Anna Svendsen, Mr Reza Habibi and Mr Wassim Rustom.
Website: https://historicizingmodernists2018.weebly.com/


This conference marks the publication of 30 books in the two book series Historicizing Modernism and Modernist Archives with Bloomsbury Academic. 

Archival excavation and detailed contextualisation is becoming increasingly central to scholarship on literary modernism. In recent years, the increased – and often online – accessibility and dissemination of previously unpublished or little-known texts has led to paradigm-shifting scholarly interventions across a range of canonical and lesser-known authors, neglected topics, and critical methodologies including genetic criticism, intertextuality, book history, and historical documentation. This trend is only bound to increase as large-scale digitisation of archival materials gathers pace, and existing copyright restrictions gradually lapse.

These two book series have been at the forefront of this burgeoning trend, and this international conference will take stock of these developments. Above all, it will also point forwards, towards future avenues of research. The authors and editorial board members connected with the series will reflect upon the ‘state of the art’ regarding archive-based research within their particular sub-discipline, connecting this to Modernism Studies as a whole. The provisional paper titles listed below reflect their responses to this invitation.

We would now like to solicit up to 15 papers in this area from interested scholars and postgraduate students. Please send us a 200-word abstract and brief biographical statement by 10 March 2018 if you are interested in giving a paper.

The total cost for the conference is £90 waged / £45 unwaged. This includes a 3-course conference dinner on 18 May, lunches, coffee/tea, and a wine reception.

There is also the option of registering for the conference without giving a paper, at the same rates as above. We have an upper limit of 15 non-speaking delegates.

Conference registration will open at 5 pm on Thursday 17th May. The conference will end at 5 pm on Saturday, 19th of May.

Please contact [log in to unmask] to register.




Confirmed speakers (for full abstracts, please contact the organisers):

Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, New Zealand)
‘Demented ^annotated^ Particulars: Samuel Beckett's Murphy after the Notebooks’

Iain Bailey (University of Manchester, UK)
‘Values and Validity in Beckett Studies’

Tom Berenato (University of Virginia, USA)
‘The Uniqueness of David Jones’

Rebecca Bowler (Keele University, UK)
‘May Sinclair’s Intertextual (Dis)orderly Archive’

Mark Byron (University of Sydney, Australia)
‘“Let Me Be Free of Printers”: The Reception of Ezra Pound’s Generative Archive’

Jamie Callison (Nord University, Norway)
‘Reintegrating Eliot’

Wayne Chapman (Clemson University, USA)
‘Yeats Now and in the Next Generation: The Legacy of the Archives’

Michael Davis (Princeton Theological Seminary, USA)
‘“There can be but one ‘Sordello’ / but Sordello and my Sordello?” – The Pounds of the Pound Archive’

David Deutsch (University of Alabama, USA)
‘Richard Bruce Nugent’s Unpublished Queer Modernism’

Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
‘Recording Crisis Between Public and Private Textualities: Literary Diaries and the Outbreak of WW2’

Tom Goldpaugh (Marist College, USA)
‘“To Make an Attempt Somehow”: Recovering David Jones’ Lost Project’

Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
‘Djuna Barnes on the Page, on the Stage and in the Margins’

Archie Henderson (Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, USA)
‘Finding Aids and the Study of Modernist Authors’


Miranda Hickman (McGill University, Canada)
‘“Which values are important”: Q. D. Leavis on the “Rise of English”’

Alexander Howard (University of New South Wales, Australia)
“The words, a flesh that lives on, as spirit, after we are gone”, or, Charles Henri Ford and the Modernist Archive

Gerri Kimber (University of Northampton, UK)
‘Modernist (Dis)location: The Case of Katherine Mansfield’

Michael Kindellan (University of Sheffield, UK)
‘Pound’s Doggerel’

Jonas Kurlberg (University of Edinburgh, UK)
‘Consulting the Moot Papers’

Greg Maertz (St. John’s University, USA)
‘Aesthetic Anarchy and the Problem of Representing the New Germany: The Lost Archive of Nazi Art Criticism’

Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College, USA)
‘Will this Yowling Never Cease? The Pound/Agresti Correspondence and the Changing Scope of Ezra Pound Studies’

Steven Matthews (University of Reading, UK)
‘The Presence of the Modernist Poet, In and Out of the Archive’

Henry Mead (Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, UK)
‘“A House in the Cinders”: A Review of the Hulme Archives’

Michelle Moore (College of DuPage, USA)
‘“Showing It as It Is”: American Modernism and the Archive’

Lois Overbeck (Emory University, USA)
‘The Legacy of Gray Archives: The Letters of Samuel Beckett’

Anthony Paraskeva (University of Roehampton, UK)
‘Postwar Cinema and Its Contexts in Beckett’s Letters’

Natasha Periyan (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
‘Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Archive: From Modernism’s “Exquisite Flower” to Its Assiduous Researcher’

Anne Price-Owen (Swansea University, Wales)
‘David Jones and the “Mabon” Films, 1971’

Susan Schreibman (University of Maynooth, Ireland)
‘The MacGreevy Archives’



Julie Taylor (Northumbria University, UK)
‘Illumination in Obscurity: Djuna Barnes’s Archive and the Fantasy of Textual Purity’

Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
‘The Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’

Chrissie Van Mierlo (University of Nottingham, UK)
‘The Joyce Archive Industry’

Pim Verhulst (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
‘The Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’

Janet Wilson (University of Northampton, UK)
‘Postwar Modernist Poets at the BBC Written Archive Centre’

Michelle Witen (University of Basel, Switzerland)
‘James Joyce and the [Musical] Archive’

Alice Wood (De Montfort University, UK)
‘Papers and Politics: Reading and Editing the Woolf Archive’