During the registration process, you will have the opportunity to select a seminar should you wish to participate in one (seminar titles and descriptions are listed below). In advance of the seminar meeting at MSA, participants produce short papers in response to the seminar topic description and share them with the entire group through whatever mechanism the seminar leaders devise. All participants are to read all of the participants’ papers—a process that aims to ensure careful and significant dialogue on the topic. Seminars take place at MSA in blocks of two hours and thirty minutes. Typically, the first two hours are devoted to specific discussion of the topic by seminar participants and the final thirty minutes allow room for questions, general discussion, and/or participation of auditors, if relevant. This year, rather than selecting a seminar as part of general registration, you will need to do so through our additional programming form.
ROLES: SEMINAR LEADERS and INVITED PARTICIPANTS
Seminars are led by anywhere between one and three leaders who have some experience or knowledge foundational to the seminar topic, and who can represent different professional stages or institutional statuses.
Some seminar leaders choose to invite a few people to join a seminar in some special role—usually scholars with special interest or expertise in the topic. It is entirely up to seminar leaders whether to exercise this option or not. All seminar leaders are welcome to invite up to two invited participants and can determine their precise role. Seminar organizers are, however, strongly urged to require invited participants to produce papers or prepare responses for the seminar in order to feed the dialogue of the seminar and to make the best use of everyone’s time.
Seminars function best when they foster considered, sustained intellectual dialogue anchored in the work that seminar participants circulate in advance and a lively conversation among peers during the seminar itself. Repeated experience suggests that seminars also function best when all participants, with the exception of the seminar leader(s), produce fresh, written work for the occasion.
The MSA encourages seminar leaders to discuss with invited participants the role they will play in the seminar in the earliest stages of the planning process.
AUDITORS
Seminars are limited to a set number of participants. By default, auditors are NOT permitted; seminar leaders may, however, choose to allow auditors but must inform the conference organizers.
PRE-CONFERENCE GUIDELINES
Seminar leaders should set firm guidelines for each seminar from their first or second contact with seminar participants. These should include, at a minimum:
- A deadline for submission of written work (preferably about six weeks before the conference). It is MSA’s policy that participants who do not submit written work will not be listed in the conference program for a seminar. It is perfectly appropriate to be tough: More than one seminar has suffered because participants did not have sufficient time to read all of the papers carefully.
- A recommended length for seminar papers (typically 5 to 7 pages).
- The procedure for sharing of written work.
Other guidelines are up to individual leaders and can lend seminars their unique styles. In the past, some leaders have provided a list of recommended readings and/or a list of questions the group should consider. Some have assigned participants to generate detailed critiques of each other’s work in pairs or small groups, in addition to all of the participants reading each other’s work. Leaders have also given specific paper guidelines guiding content (encouraging or discouraging textual, theoretical, or methodological analysis, e.g.).
CONFERENCE GUIDELINES
The seminar leader acts as a facilitator, rather than an instructor, in conducting this discussion among peers. It is the seminar leader’s job to ensure that the dialogue is inclusive; a leader must not allow one or two participants to dominate and should exercise the chair’s prerogative to steer discussion in a way that includes everyone. No responsibility is more important than making sure that everyone gets to participate fully, and that everyone’s submission gets attention.
SEMINARS
Offbeat Acknowledgements in Modernist Writing
Leaders: Dr. Alexandra Peat (University of Galway), Dr. Emily Ridge (University of Galway)
The acknowledgement page has become a standard feature of contemporary literature, a paratextual space for authors to offer thanks, signal networks of personal and professional support, or cite sources. Following the premise that the shape and function of the contemporary acknowledgment page has evolved and crystallised since the mid-to-late twentieth century, this seminar is interested in those offbeat forms of acknowledgement that existed before the consolidation of acknowledgement as a paratextual practice, paying particular attention to modernist acknowledgements.
We particularly welcome explorations of offbeat or ‘weird’ modes of acknowledgment. As this was a paratextual element not yet established as an expected ‘bibliographic code’ (Bornstein, 2001: 6), modernist manifestations of acknowledgement are often eccentric in appearance, arrangement, style, tone, positionality and form. Moreover, acknowledgements are often both dispersed within works (epigraphs, footnotes, etc.) and displaced from the works (located at a remove within letters, essays, diaries, reviews, etc.) The seminar will start with definitions. What is an acknowledgement in the context of literary production more broadly and within modernist literary production more specifically? How should we interpret forms of acknowledgement when they are not a recognized element of a literary work? What, who and how did modernist writers acknowledge? To what extent do acknowledgements remain a private textual practice for modernists, and can we identify a shift in modernist writing towards public declarations which perhaps reflects broader trends in the professionalization of writing? Do acknowledgements speak to affective affiliations, distributions of power and/or cultural norms? We invite interventions on the subject of acknowledgement in three broad categories: 1) ideas around modernist paratext; 2) the institutionalisation of writing and publishing practices; 3) ideas of collaboration and network building.
Women+ in Modernist Publishing and Print
Leaders: Prof. Nicola Wilson (University of Reading), Dr. Claire Battershill (University of Toronto)
In our recent co-edited volume, The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2020 (EUP, 2024), we identified a rapidly developing field of intersectional feminist book and publishing history—one that is reshaping understandings of women’s long-standing and often historically under-valued contributions to publishing and print production. Building on crucial scholarship by Jayne Marek (1995) and Shari Benstock (1986), contributors to the modernist section of the volume traced a “constellation” (Battershill 2022) of women’s modernist print activity, examining figures such as Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Nancy Cunard, Caresse Crosby, Maria Jolas, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Noémia de Sousa, Natalie and Lea Danesi, Gwenda David, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Marie Neurath, Nella Larsen, Ethel Gutman, and Eva Collet Reckitt. While the volume assembled a diverse range of fascinating women’s stories, it also underscored the need for further scholarly engagement with this expanding field.
This seminar invites contributors to extend and deepen research into women’s varied roles in modernist publishing and book production. The early twentieth century was a period of dynamic change in print culture, shaped by the rise of literary agents; the uneven evolution of systems of literary patronage; and the continued growth of popular print. Women worked across a wide spectrum of sites—including libraries, publishing houses, print rooms, drawing offices, bookshops, and design firms—yet many of these contributions remain understudied. We welcome reflections and new research that illuminate the gendered terrain of modernist print and book history. We invite contributors to consider the question: what does feminist modernist book and publishing history look like?
Unsettling multilingualisms in global modernism
Leaders: Dr. Juliette Taylor-Batty (Leeds Trinity University), Prof. Anjali Nerlekar (Rutgars University)
Although multilingualism is central to modernist writing, it is only relatively recently that it has begun to receive enough critical attention in the academy in the US, UK, and Europe. In the context of Anglo-European studies, since Yasemin Yildiz’s powerful presentation of the concept of the “postmonolingual” in 2012 (the tension between the pressures of the monolingual paradigm and the usages of the multiligual), there has been an increasing number of studies that present a history that shows the consistent and pervasive presence of multilingualism in everyday practices, texts, performances, and speech. However, it is also true that despite these studies, and despite modernism’s foundational linguistic experimentation, the monolingual paradigm remains entrenched in the study of ‘national’ languages and literatures, often constraining the manner in which we read these texts. In this seminar, we want to push further the interrogation of monolingualisms and multilingualisms, their liberatory potential, their strategic deployments in texts, and their potential for resistance.
Participants should present position papers on their current work in this context, and the list below is only a suggestion of possible topics: global modernism and multilingualism; gender and multilingualism; class and multilingualism; caste and multilingualism; academia and multilingual modernism; multilingualism and affect; the unit of the multilingual in literature; multilingualism and checkpoints; the history of multilingualism in literary studies.
In this seminar, we invite position papers that examine multilingual modernism from a range of global perspectives, and we hope to bring together colleagues with different linguistic, cultural and literary spheres of knowledge.
Strange methods: modernism and progressive education
Leader: Dr. Isabelle Parkinson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Scholarly work on the relationships of modernism with education over the last few years has moved beyond examinations of the New Critical project to professionalise the academy and has begun to uncover the complex web of relations between modernist cultural production and progressive education. In examinations, for example, of the significance of Virginia Woolf’s and D.H. Lawrence’s experience of teaching for their writing, of the influence of Ruskinian pedagogy in Dorothy Richardson’s work, of the radical practices at the Black Mountain College, and of the role of resistant pedagogies for writers in colonial and post-colonial contexts, scholars have attended both to the historical connections between modernism and progressive education and to the creative potential of these strange new pedagogical methods. If we agree with Rebecca Beasley that ‘Defamiliarization, learning “to see”, was at the heart of Black Mountain’s progressivism’, with Peter Howarth that ‘the modernist novel's anti-educational stance should be understood as an attempt at counter-education’, and with Ben Conisbee Baer that revolutionary modernist colonial pedagogies are a ‘radical short-circuit of the rationality [colonial education] entail[s]’, then the intersection of modernism and progressive education is indeed characterised by its productive weirdness. How far, however, this was a laudable confluence of radical utopian projects, and how far it was a convenient alliance of hegemonic interests, is still open to question. This seminar aims to bring together scholars working on modernism and progressive education to explore and problematise the conjunctions of these strange new practices.
Teaching Film and Media
Leaders: Dr. Marc Farrior (Southern Utah University), Dr. Carolyn Jacobs (Central Connecticut State University), Dr. Alix Beeston (Cardiff University), Dr. Nicholas Forster (University of Oregon)
Modernism’s fascination with formal experiment and estranged perception finds a natural counterpart in today’s classroom where film and media pedagogy continually re-creates its “weird” energy. This seminar invites participants to consider teaching itself as a modernist experiment, where its practice is an art of assemblage, montage, and defamiliarization. How might our courses or modules on film, literature, and/or media reproduce the generative weirdness of modernist culture, not only through the works we assign but also in the way we engage students and assess their learning? Bringing together educators and scholars who work across film, literature, digital media, and multimodal composition, this seminar encourages reflection on pedagogy as making. Participants may discuss classroom practices that teach students how form produces meaning. In keeping with the conference theme, we invite approaches that embrace strangeness, sensory disorientation, or productive failure as pedagogical tools not only in their approach to modernist texts, but also in teaching a broad range of topics and materials. We seek examples from courses from disciplines and subjects including—but not limited to—film theory and history, film and video production, media studies, adaptation studies, literature, history, art and art history, and graphic design. We welcome interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to the study of film, media, and related areas.Guiding questions to consider:
- How can assignments embody the experimental or uncanny qualities of modernism?
- What happens when students become media makers rather than passive viewers?
- How do digital platforms and archives extend or distort our understanding of modernist form and (or) film?
- What ethical or affective challenges arise when teaching “weirdness” as method?
Weird Forms: Modernism goes to College/in the University
Leaders: Dr. Andy Hines (Swarthmore College), Dr. Rebecca Roach (University of Brimingham)
One assumes that the primary forms that define the life of the literary critic are the close reading, the monograph, the essay, but how weird that we spend far more time writing lesson plans, seminar proposals, tenure reviews, letters of recommendation, memos, travel reimbursement reports and grant applications. This seminar explores this weird professional reality and modernism’s critical mediating role both in originating many of these forms and how, in turn, those forms mediate modernism and modernist studies today.
Modernism played a critical role in institutionalizing forms and methods as the university underwent mass expansion and standardization in the post-war years (via I. A. Richards, the New Critics, etc.), thus supplying scholars a basis from which they forever seek to depart. Recent work in the “new disciplinary history” (Buurma and Heffernan and others) reveal how a much more complex realm of activity comes to bear on interpretive practices and the life of the profession. In addition to this scholarly expansion, this mode of attention opens up a wide array of historical subjects who did writing that normally would be overlooked from study. This may speak directly to the life of workers–whether in the office, at home, or in the colony–and this seminar recognizes that critics and scholars are also hailed into writing more memos or grocery lists than close readings.
We invite short papers (or non-traditional forms) that attend to the broad, and often weird, consequences of modernism’s institutionalisation in the modern university. Topics might include taxonomies of past and present academic forms; how investigating academic forms reconceptualizes our knowledge of disciplinary practice; how modernist culture was shaped by a relationship with the forms of the bureaucratic and informational state; or how the standardization of forms makes possible exploitation and automation via technologies like generative AI.
Weird Fates and Futures of Modernism
Leaders: Prof. Maren Linett (Purdue University), Prof. Cynthia Port (Caoastal Carolina University)
The word “weird” is etymologically related to fate and futurity, and indeed modernist conceptions of futures ran the gamut from radical to conservative, celebratory to anguished, utopian to dystopian, naturalist to technophilic. In this seminar, we solicit papers about conceptions of futurity within modernism. How did modernist writers and artists, architects and urban planners, understand futurity? What aspects of futures did they foreground? And how did they react to those conceptions, implicitly or explicitly? Did they seek to bring them about, revise them, resist them, or some combination of these? Moreover, how did they understand the relation of their literary works to their conceptions of futurity? What models might they offer as we face our own competing twenty-first-century conceptions of the future? Contributors might consider questions of reproductive futurism and queer resistance; eugenic conceptions of futurity and anti-eugenic resistance; racist and antiracist grapplings with discourses that alleged that “unfit races” would inevitably disappear; aesthetic forms of engagement with Futurism; questions of aging and/or disability and conversely, erasures of old and/or disabled states of being; representations of suicidality that reject futures altogether; relationships among past, present, and future such as lingering beliefs in maternal impression; religious ideas of future disembodied existences; fantasies or fears of technological advancement; and any other questions relating to modernist engagement with futurity. Ulla Kriebernegg, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz in Austria and a member of the Rejecting Futures Research Group of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany, will be joining us as an invited participant.
Weird Science and the Modernist Body
Leaders: Dr. Rebecca Bowler (Keele University), Dr. Laura Ludtke (Merton College, Oxford)
Developments in scientific healthcare during and after the two world wars – nutritional advice, fitness, vaccination, reproductive and mental health – changed the ways people thought about their bodies; conflict gave greater symbolic significance to strength and health. The medicalisation of sexuality created new norms of individual bodily experience and raised questions about what made a life (in)complete and (un)healthy. It was not always easy to distinguish between new science – often weird and untested – and crank theories of wellness.
In this period, great advances were being made in nutritional science: the discovery of vitamins; new knowledge about fats and wholegrains; calorie counting. Scientists variously advocated for vegetarian diets or greater meat-eating. Sanatoria and health resorts experimented with water cures, fresh air cures and diet cures; theories about the oxygenation of the blood led to greater emphasis on physical culture. The transnational popularity of fitness advocates such as Bernarr MacFadden, Eugen Sandow and J. P. Müller was in part due to their conscious appeal to scientific discourse relating to the body: its shape, health, and longevity. In the same period, the isolation of hormones like testosterone and the development of glandular rejuvenation therapies radically reshaped the cultural understanding of body modification. Commentators in and beyond the scientific community developed theories about how bodily ‘energy’ should be used – or sublimated – to benefit society, from Marie Stopes to the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and occultists like Aleister Crowley.
This seminar invites position papers (5-7 pages) concerned with the weird intersections between science, technology and the body. We are interested in scientific interventions into lifestyle and wellness; lay or literary interventions in science; crank medicine and innovative practice; political projects manifesting as medical ‘advice.’ In the first half of the seminar, we will discuss papers in turn and in the second half explore parallels and developing themes.
Caring Modernists?
Leaders: Dr. Milena Schwab-Graham (University of Leeds), Dr. Emily Bell (Loughborough University), Dr. Jade French (Loughborough University), Ms. Paula Maher Martin (University of Galway)
Modernist creative production was characterised by networks and relationships among friends, partners, family, editors, and authors (Micir, 2019; Phillips and Vorano, 2025). However, the care work, care ethics, and caring relationships which underpin modernist networks remain under-theorised. We invite position papers on how modernist works are related to care, and how care ethics can alter our interactions with modernist texts. Conversely: can we call modernists caring? Colder affects (Burstein; 2012), insularity (Esty, 2009), and forms of impersonality (Rives, 2012; Gonzalez, 2020), violence and fascism (Mackay, 2017; Cole, 2012) also mark modernist aesthetics. How do avant-garde experiments capture experiences of care? How is literary production embedded in/indebted to practices of care? How does modernist literary production resist insularity? How might care be a form of disruption in modernist literary depictions?
In care ethics, recent theoretical developments emphasise interdependency, context-specificity, and relational responsibility (The Care Collective, 2020; Bunting, 2020; Bellacasa, 2017). Disability justice activism is highly attuned to ‘the gendered/raced/classed dynamics of care’, arguing that accessible collective care is essential to solidarity, sustenance and survival in a world where ‘[c]are is feminized and invisibilized labor’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, 40). Care ethics not only occur between humans but also ‘more-than-human worlds’ (Bellacasa, 2017; Haraway, 2016). How do these definitions of care and inter-relationality chime with or challenge modernist aesthetics?
This seminar will explore care as a relational experience in literary works, artistic forms and cultural traditions. We are also interested in how modernist scholars might better perform care in our own communities, taking a lead from the special issue ‘Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid’ (Bloom and Hartmann-Villalta, 2024) which foregrounded pandemic experiences, precarious work, and disciplinary changes. We invite position papers about modernism, care and: networks of cultural production, affect and emotion, thing theory, ecology and the environment, ethics, labour rights, precarity, and the posthuman.
Risky Modernism
Leaders: Dr. Mantra Mukim (University of Oxford), Prof. Jarad Zimbler (King's College London), Prof. Alys Moody (Bard College)
In the narratives that frame late twentieth-century cultural and intellectual life, risk emerges as a defining term—political, environmental, financial, and philosophical—shaping what Beck famously called the ‘risk society’. No longer confined to local or national spheres, and no longer limited to Knight’s notion of the merely ‘predictable and quantifiable’, risk has proliferated on a global and intergenerational scale, becoming constitutive of post-War modernity. This seminar asks how risk is registered by and expressed through literary imagination and literary form across the long twentieth century. It invites participants to think of modernist risk through periods of war, ideological polarization, secrecy, indeterminacy, and large-scale decolonization. Understanding risk beyond isolated historical events, the seminar treats it as a pervasive epistemological force, both generated by and generating a specific kind of modernity. It operates through institutional frameworks, where it is often anticipated and managed, and aesthetic practices, which are active agents within risk economies. Global modernist texts not only embody and amplify existing vulnerabilities but also disrupt business-as-usual, posing their own degrees of danger. At the same time, modernism can also articulate pathways beyond precarious conditions, offering imaginative resources for negotiating and transforming risky modes of living.
Modernism’s long association with qualities of provocation and danger, offers a natural point of entry for our understanding of risk societies. Early twentieth-century works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Barnes’s Nightwood exemplify modernist risk in the West, while Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita dramatizes it under Soviet censorship. Subsequently, in the Cold War, this dynamic is transformed in the American context, where modernism’s radical edge is softened into what Barnishel has termed ‘bourgeois politics’, as state-sponsored programs aligned modernist art practices with ideological interests. In the same timeframe, and in sites of decolonisation, global modernist practices proliferate (Walkowitz and Mao 2008; Friedman 2015; Moody and Ross 2020), and stretch beyond their national, regional, and partisan commitments to narrate, or undertake, formal and political risks. The seminar aims to trace how internal and external dangers shaped literary form and aestheticambitions for modernist writers across the globe.
At stake is a set of entangled questions: What makes risk a defining tenet of modernism? How does it reconfigure literary form? What threats does modernism pose to its readers, and detractors, alike? For this seminar, we invite short papers (5–7 pages) that engage risk as a critical lens for reading modernism—whether through formal risks, institutional hazards, wagers of alternative modernities, or threats of the marketplace.
Weird Rural Modernisms: Technology, Machinery and the Question of the Countryside
Leaders: Dr. Maria Farland (Fordham University), Dr. Ben Child (Colgate University), Dr. Kristin Bluemel (Monmouth University)
This seminar seeks to reconsider modernism through the “weird” lens of machinery and technology—analytic categories that tend to be linked to urban rather than rural spaces. To consider the rural in terms of technology is a kind of defamiliarization; in place of the skyscraper and the subway, we encounter contraptions and innovations that verge on the fantastical: steam plows, plant inventors, irrigation systems and experimental agricultural machinery.
Modernism has long been associated with the city, the machine, and the accelerated tempos and technologies of metropolitan life. Yet from the mid nineteenth century onward, rural spaces were equally shaped by—and generative of—modernist experimentation, with modernizing technologies playing a central role in these representations. Technological transformations in agriculture, transportation, communication, and energy profoundly reconfigured rural life, landscapes, and imaginaries, with the countryside serving as a crucial site for aesthetic innovation, political contestation, and scientific innovations like patents.
We invite papers that examine how rural spaces intersect with technological modernity across literature, art, architecture, film, media, and material culture. How did modernist artists and writers engage with mechanized agriculture, electrification, railways, radio, or industrial extraction in rural and agricultural contexts? In what ways did these modernisms circulate across national borders, empires, and oceans? How did technological change reshape ideas of tradition, nature, labor, and community outside the city?
The seminar particularly welcomes work that challenges metronormative narratives of modernism and situates rurality as a dynamic, heterogeneous, and globally connected field. Comparative, multilingual, globally inflected, and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Seminar members are invited to share 5-7 page position papers in advance, and the group will meet for a lively conversation about how this variant of “weird” rural modernism serves to unsettle our standard accounts of literary and cultural expression in this period.
Ghost Writing Modernism Writing Ghosts
Leaders: Dr. Catherine Hollis (Independent Schoar), Dr. Shilo McGiff (Independent Scholar)
This seminar proposes that we take the spirit of “ghost writing” seriously, especially as concerns the invisible labor of developing, editing, annotating, indexing, or coding text. To ghost write a text is to work invisibly and generously, to embody another’s words in material form, without being detected as the “invisible hand” doing the labor. Collaborative writing is a form of ghost writing, where the edges blur between individuals. Life writing, archival research and bibliographic work are also forms of ghostly labor, where biographers and researchers act as mediums channeling the words and works of the dead. Ghost writing can be an act of love or an unrecognized slog, a form of legacy creation or exploitative academic labor.
How is the invisible labor of these varying forms of ghost writing legitimized or made legible as knowledge creation? How does posthumous manuscript completion embody the work of mourning? How are ghosts and spirit mediumship represented in modernism? How does feminist recovery work and citation channel the voices of the dead, the silenced, and the missing? Where and how do the unquiet ghosts of empire and indigeneity harrow modernist texts? What absent presences and unresolved ethical dilemmas haunt modernist studies?
Instead of position papers, we will follow the seminar model developed by Erica Delsandro and Jen Mitchell. Seminar members will contribute to a shared google doc in advance of the conference. We will provide prompts and questions for responses, allowing for our discussion to start in advance of the conference itself. This live, evolving, collaborative document offers an experiment in collaborative ghost writing, while also allowing for the expression of each individual’s positions.
Raggy Content: New Materialist Approaches to Modernist Editing and Book History
Leaders: Prof. Clare Hutton (Loughborough University), Dr. Claire Drewery (Sheffieled Hallam), Prof. Andrew Thacker (Notthingham Trent University)
Inspired by Jonathan Senchyne’s ‘Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History and the Archive in Paper’ (Studies in Romanticism, 2018) (‘the language of materialism has taken hold in book history’), this seminar invites all colleagues to join us in thinking about what is really new in the fields of Modernist editing and book history. Convened by Claire Drewery (Sheffield Hallam), Clare Hutton (Loughborough) and Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent), we are keen to discuss the method, rationale and thinking behind current solo or collaborative projects in Modernist editing and book history.
Questions we might explore include: What is distinctive about approaches to Modernist editing and book history in the twenty-first century? How have the affordances of digital scholarship and genetic criticism changed the way we read and edit? How have new archives and a new politics of gender changed established views? How do the methodologies of book history and editing intersect with those of literary criticism, and with what impact? To what extent has new materialism (or ‘thing theory’) inflected current approaches, including those of the New Modernist Editing Network (convened by Bryony Randall, 2019-2021)? Are there bodies of material which might be characterised as odd, weird, unusual, counter cultural or counter-intuitive and how does current scholarship accommodate this? Is there, as Senchyne suggests, a sweet spot where material book and literary narrative meet?
The ‘raggy content’ of our title (from Senchyne) may be read metaphorically as well as literally. We are keen to encourage a diversity of approaches to a movement which flourished in the final century of print dominance. How do we read or edit the specific and papery temporalities of Modernist books now that we live with the methodological quandaries and opportunities brought about by the digital? How do we understand and read the achievements of the forgotten intermediaries of Modernist culture (such as booksellers, reviewers, editors, critics, and essayists)? What kinds of newness do book historians and editors bring to the scholarly field? Is it still possible to make it new?
(Please consider joining us by registering for this seminar, and submitting a 5-7 page response in advance for pre-circulation to all registered participants.)
Weird Intimacies
Leaders: Dr. Patrock Query, Dr. Eret Talviste (University of Tartu)
At the end of The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West’s 1918 novel, the narrator, Jenny, reports that “We kissed, not as women, but as lovers do.” It is a surprising moment, full of strange energy because there has been very little to anticipate it. We are interested in such weird intimacies across modernist texts. What other examples can you think of where intimacy—a kiss, a touch, a gesture, a look, an exchange of words—is surprising, unequal, unrealized, or otherwise weird? And what do such examples suggest about the status of intimacy within modernism?
The featured participant in our seminar will be Eret Talviste, whose new book, Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh UP, 2025), explores “intimate moments and strange encounters between unlikely characters and their environments, enhancing the characters’ sense of being attached to life during uncertain times.” Talviste’s book also explores intimacies and continuities between feminist theories of embodiment and more recent theories in posthumanism and affect, tracing how many strands of these contemporary theories are indebted to older work in gender studies. Zooming in on Jinny’s kiss on Louis’s neck in The Waves (1931), for example, she explores how that kiss, perhaps like Jenny’s kiss in West’s novel, embodies more than a fleeting brush of intimacy and instead marks histories of normative organisation of gender, class, and national roles.
For the purposes of this seminar, we also include intimacies whose strangeness stems from their frustration, futility, incompleteness, awkwardness, or other ways in which they subvert or fall short of an ideal. We welcome short papers on any way in which modernist intimacy is weird or strange because we want to learn how different intimacies, perhaps seen as private and internal, organised modernism in its public and external appearances.
The Weird Space Between Modernism and Modernity
Leader: Dr. Genevieve Brassard (University of Portland)
The Space Between Society exists in a parallel universe to MSA since the inception of both scholarly associations. Much overlap exists in the membership of both groups, and many scholars easily travel between the two. Ironically, modernist scholars consider the period between the two world wars the height of Modernism, while excluding a large and varied body of work. In fact, the interwar period is rich with artifacts at the center of modernity but on the margins of modernism; authors, texts, and genres from those decades blur or defy categories privileged in ‘high modernism’ studies. This seminar is open to anyone studying the interwar period but extends a special invitation to scholars who have found a congenial home in the Space Between Society yet often feel “weird” at MSA, or for whom MSA sometimes feels weirdly unwelcoming.
This seminar welcomes papers grappling with texts or cultural artifacts from the 1914-1945 period that merit scholarly attention despite their continued marginalization. Possibilities include the following: popular, lowbrow, or middlebrow texts; marginalized authors or artists; cultural achievements or movements; recent efforts in republishing out-of-print works (Persephone Books, Handheld Press, McNally Editions, Daunt Books, etc.); the affective relationship between artifacts and audience (both current and contemporaneous); making literary knowledge legible to non-specialized audiences (including and especially students); pedagogical approaches grounded in concrete and transferable skills to analyze modern artifacts; and reconsiderations of weird artists and authors from the interwar period.
Prizing Modernism Now
Leader: Dr. Sarah Terry (Oglethorpe University)
From the Dial Award to the Guggenheim and the Bollingen Prize in the twentieth century, to the Goldsmiths Prize in the twenty-first century, this seminar explores the afterlives of the twentieth-century institutionalization of literary achievement by fellowship and prize-giving bodies which promoted modernist production. Participants are invited to explore the ways in which different literary awards and prizes may offer new perspectives on modernism, especially tracking their legacies within our historical moment as they continue to privilege the “weirdness” of modernism as it surfaces in contemporary literature. In drawing direct lines from modernist literature to contemporary prizewinning literature, we might also consider the tension between the aesthetic and the political in the ways we tend to define “radical” literature as synonymous with experimental, while often dismissing literature that contains the direct and unsubtle declaration of radical politics.
Theoretical, historical, and pedagogical approaches are all welcome, as are papers that engage with the politics of prizes and awards from the modernist to the contemporary.
Weird Resistances to Allegory
Leaders: Prof. Rishona Zimring (Lewis and Clarke College), Prof. Martin Harries (University of California, Irvine)
Allegory has long been a familiar critical strategy to ward off the strangeness of modernist art. We seek papers on resistances to allegory. Where allegory is a privileged form of making sense—or, put otherwise, a time-honored form of explaining away—how might the weird name forms of modernist production and reception that refuse allegorical assimilation? Does the weird dis-arrange Rancière’s distribution of the sensible? Is Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory weird enough? We are interested in thinking together about how critics, readers, and audiences have assimilated what should resist assimilation, and the possibilities of nevertheless finding critical languages for the unassimilable, languages which do not revert to familiar forms of allegoresis. Participants may find instructive Angus Fletcher’s 1964 Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, and in particular its appendix on “Illustrations.” The Symbolist and Surrealist paintings of Redon, Moreau, Ernst, Delvaux, and de Chirico occasion Fletcher’s claim that all surrealist elements throughout the history of Western painting are allegorical; their “odds and ends” and “discontinuity” create effects of allegorical “enigma.” The seminar seeks out modernist enigmas that might resist rather than illustrate allegory.
- Formal resistance to allegorical closure;
- Historical performance in theater, dance, or other genres which frustrates the allegorical impulse;
- Curatorial resistance to allegorical synthesis/weird re-presentations of modernism;
- Weird anti-allegorical forms of reception;
- Feminist and other forms of recovery that exclude or resist allegory;
- Weird revivals of modernism in theater or other venues;
- Annotations, footnotes, and guides to modernist monuments (The Waste Land, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway) as allegorical interpretations
- Strange modernist biographies; strange biographies of modernists; strange biographies of modernist critics; biography as allegorical or anti-allegorical
- Anti-allegorical approaches to children’s literature and children’s literature as anti-allegorical modernism
- Surface reading, and other critical languages for the anti-allegorical, as weirdly modernist
Participants will pre-circulate papers of about five pages: these papers will be the basis of our in-person seminar. We are open to alternative forms of criticism.
The Weirding of Text into Image
Leader: Dr. Elisabeth Joyce (Pennsylvania Western University)
How text appears on the page has been of periodic interest to poets for centuries. This interest grew in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century poets as shown by the work of Stephane Mallarmé and by artistic movements such as Dada. Concrete poetry, a style of poetry mostly from Germany and Brazil in the 1950’s (Thomas) adhered to this interest. Other types of experimental poetry have worked on the liminal edges between text and image, where the appearance of the text supersedes its content, as in more recent work by Susan Howe. Generally speaking, as Greg Thomas argues, this poetry is “concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense” (Thomas 4) in its turn to the visual.
This seminar is open to all considerations of text as it merges into image, from typography issues to graphic design approaches and including electronic kinetic forms. I am particularly interested in relatively under-explored work, such as that by Veronica Forrest-Thomson or Anne Wysocki, but I am open to considerations of any work from any country or time period.
Degrowth: Modernism’s Weird Political Economy (Modernism and Environment SIG)
Leaders: Dr. Sookyoung Lee (St. Lawrence University), Dr. Joel Duncan (Independent Scholar)
The degrowth movement, since its inception in the late 1970s as an intellectual project of a few vanguard economists in Europe, has steadily gained traction to become a viable and even necessary alternative to the ills of modernity. Degrowth thought places the capitalist system of production squarely at the heart of current global ecological and social crises. Excess commodity markets, overconsumption, and corporate abuse are no mere complications or erroneous phenomena; rather, degrowth thinkers argue, “development” is an anti-democratic, hegemonic impulse that holds entire populations hostage to the agendas of a few. Indeed, that 1% owns 40% of the world’s wealth is weird – weird in the etymological sense of having transformed (werden) planetary existence into single-uses; of having subsumed, like the Weird Sisters, some supernatural power over other creatures and chimerically turning choices into a destructive fate (wyrd).
Perhaps, though, we find in modernism’s insurgent spirit early signs of being weirded out by the growth paradigm. How might modernism have rethought what socially necessary and unnecessary production entails? This Modernism & Environment SIG-sponsored seminar invites participants to consider modernism’s relationship to the degrowth movement and thought by considering how modernist texts experiment with, resist, or critique modernity’s paradigms of growth and development. Topics might include:
- bildungsroman and narrative structures of growth
- maximalist vs. minimalist aesthetics
- futurism and technology
- utopianism and revolutionary change
- colonial expansion
- macroeconomic theories and measurements, the discipline of economics
- stewardship, especially its class dimensions
- 19th century science of social energetics
We are interested in papers of all forms: works in progress, position-papers, notes from the field, methodological reflections, teaching ideas, plans for community engagement projects, manifestos, manuals for everyday action, and so on. As with previous SIG seminars, our goal is to open a space for collaborative discussion, resource-sharing, and community-building around how modernist studies can contribute to broader efforts to renovate, defend, repair, critically reinhabit, or propose alternatives to the paradigms we’ve inherited.
Suggested Reading:
- Kohei Saito, Slow Down: A Degrowth Manifesto (Astra House 2024)
- Jason Hickel, “On Technology and Degrowth,” Monthly Review 75: 3 (July-August 2023)
- Aaron Vansintjan, Andrea Vetter, and Matthias Schmelzer, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (Verso 2022)
- Giorgos Kallis et al, The Case for Degrowth (Polity 2020)
- Robert Pollin, “De-growth vs a Green New Deal,” New Left Review 112 (2018)
- Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso 2015)
Modernism and Madness after the Neurodivergent Turn
Leaders: Prof. Javier Padilla (Colgate Unviersity), Prof. Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Modernism has long been associated with representations of the mind and its disorders in the novel, poetry, memoir, and film—forms that often reflect the rise of the clinical case study as a major clinical and cultural genre. Many works adopt innovative formal strategies to render the lived experiences of neurasthenia, shell shock, hysteria, anxiety, mania, psychosis, and other forms of psychic distress. How might literary and artistic techniques of defamiliarization and experimentation be understood in the context of modernism’s many diagnostic frameworks and therapeutic methods? How are the mentally ill or cognitively disabled positioned within modernism’s social spaces and institutions? What are the linkages between psychoanalytic and psychiatric infrastructures and the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and decolonization? Might the histories of psychiatry and medicine offer alternative, overlooked frameworks for historicizing literary modernism? How might our understanding of these concerns be expanded or reframed in light of ongoing work in disability studies and medical humanities? This seminar invites papers that explore modernism in relation to the cultural and clinical histories of mental illness, cognitive disability, and neurodiversity.
The seminar will follow MSA guidelines, and participants will submit short papers (5-7 pages) six weeks before the conference. Contributors may share works in progress, portions of a larger work, methodological inquiries, critical engagements with single or multiple works, or any other reflection that engages with the seminar’s topics. Once the submissions are received, seminar leaders will circulate them to the group, as well as a set of guiding topics and questions that will serve as a starting point for our discussion. At the conference, the seminar itself will consist of roughly 10-minute interventions from each participant, followed by a more informal, open conversation.
Queer Feminist Modernities: A Strange Attraction
Leaders: Dr. Jodie Medd (Carleton University), Dr. Madelyn Detloff (Miami University (Ohio))
This seminar is designed for participants to contemplate the definitional complexity of Queer Feminist Modernities, especially given the dynamic qualities of each term: Queer, Feminist, and Modernities. In concert with the theme of this year’s MSA, we imagine the terms as akin to “strange attractors,” which in physics act something like organizing points for “chaotic” systems that are complex and liable to change, but not entirely random. (Disclaimer: This is a loose definition adapted for our own conceptual sense making, not meant to be scientifically precise.) Like complex dynamic systems, Queer Feminist Modernities can be considered in motion and open to change, but not entirely random or individualistically “relative” in the sense of “anything goes.” We invite short position papers musing on examples of queer feminist modernities, speculative definitions of queer feminist modernity/ies as a field or nexus, or theoretical forays into the “so what” of queer feminist modernities - on what we might learn from thinking these three complex terms as they interact together.
We welcome contributions from scholars at any and all stages of study, professional positions, and career paths.
Aliens, Automata, and Amphibia
Leader: Prof. Aaron Jaffe (Florida State University), Ms. Meg Cook (Florida State University)
What occurs -- aesthetically, formally, structurally, temporally, ontologically -- when the posthuman weird imposes upon the modern? This seminar explores three facets of eerie modernity: Aliens, Automata, Amphibia. These figures emerge not as mere content or theme but as conceptual nodes from the modernist media-theoretical "ground" of the weird, eerie, and eldritch. When considering more-than-human or posthuman perspectives in modernist studies, these three approaches (from above, from below, and through modes of technicity) defamiliarize form and communication itself, promoting new theoretical-conceptual frameworks for considering the modern.
Aliens-Angels disrupt anthropocentric perspective from beyond: extraterrestrial intelligence, non-human consciousness, radical alterity that troubles humanism's foundational conceits. Amphibia operate from below and between: creatures of thresholds, inhabiting multiple elements and ontological states simultaneously, figures of metamorphosis and categorical instability. Automata emerge through technicity: machines that simulate life, mechanical reproductions that challenge authenticity, artificial intelligences that blur boundaries between human and non-human agency. Together, these figures constitute a modernist bestiary of the post-human, each mode interrogating what it means to be human by staging encounters with its outside, its underside, its mechanical double.
These encounters frequently occur at sites of media breakdown and communications failure: paranoia about transmitted messages, apparatus malfunction, ghosts in the machine, signals from nowhere. The weird and eerie don't simply provide atmospheric decoration but generate epistemological and ontological crises that modernist form struggles to accommodate.
We invite position papers (5-7 pages) on eerie modernisms engaging aliens, amphibia, automata, or their intersections. Papers might address: How are these weird modalities manifested in modernist texts and media? What occurs at the intersection of the human and these eldritch forms? How do they inform posthumanist modernisms? How do communication networks, media systems, and technological apparatuses channel or distort these uncanny presences? How does the weird generate formal innovation or resistance?
Special Invited Guest: Siegfried Zielinski, the Michel Foucault Professor for Techno-Culture and Media Archaeology at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee and author of Deep Time of the Media and many other books on the archeology and variantology of media.
Weird Genealogies of Global Modernism
Leaders: Prof. Shiben Banerji (University of California, Berkley), Dr. Apala Das (Bilkent University)
Few terms in the study of art, literature, and music have proven more vexing than “global modernism.” The acknowledgement that modernism emerged across multiple sites can “operate within an assimilationist logic,” to quote the powerful critique articulated by Kaira M. Cabañas in 2021. The plural form of “global modernisms” attests to what Aarthi Vadde theorized in 2018 as “definitional proliferation.” Informed by these critical interventions, this seminar interrogates poetics and techniques of weird modernisms that constituted the globe as a category that was distinct from contemporaneous notions of world, empire, earth, and international. In framing the globe as an object of critical investigation, how might we examine its aesthetic dimensions as constituting new political, ethical, social, or economic possibilities? Such a perspective would differ from one that approaches the formal and technical aspects of a work as merely representing doctrines and ideals that supposedly exist independently of works of art, literature, music, and architecture. The distinction is particularly important when critiquing religious, psychical, and perennialist works that present humans’ fascination with the supernatural as an eternal preoccupation.
Participants will contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation analyzing occult, spiritual, or religious–aka “weird”–conceptions of belonging that were advanced through a range of modernist practices, including: experiments in automatic writing; composition of synaesthetic music; photographic, lithographic, sculptural, and painterly abstraction; and designing immersive environments. We welcome position papers, 5-7 pages in length, that advance new methods and approaches for analyzing the stakes of weird invocations of the globe. Papers could be anchored in a range of subjects, including the study of:
- techniques of askesis and ekstasis
- poetics of affiliation and fellowship across creatures
- imperial dimensions of humanitarianism and other universals
- nonviolence as a religion of equality
- noncausal narratives and accounts of consciousness
The self as material
Leaders: Dr. Annabel Williams (University of St. Andrews), Mr. Alexander Harley (Harvard University), Ms. Maria Matilde Morales (Harvard University), Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh (Villanova University)
Asked how he reacted to the sobriquet of ‘Confessionalism’ that had become attached to his intensely personal poetry, John Berryman replied: “With rage and contempt! Next question.”
M. L. Rosenthal’s tag of ‘confessionalism’ typified an enduring conventional wisdom about the forms that personal writing takes: confiding in register, emotionally heated—and, perhaps, unformed, artless, and self-hating. Such expectations have often marked the reception of personal genres, ranging from Frank O’Hara’s ‘personism’ to Natalie Sarraute’s nouveau roman, from Eldridge Cleaver’s vicious attack on James Baldwin to the often derisive reaction to the contemporary resurgence of ‘autofiction’.
Berryman’s irate reply reminds us that there are other ways to conceive of personal writing. In the early twentieth century, the rise of psychoanalysis and psychiatry unsettled and defamiliarised inherited notions of a unified subject. New technologies of perception—from film and the gramophone to medical imaging techniques—brought the promise of externalizing psychic processes. In parallel, artistic and literary avant-gardes, especially women, queer, and racialized artists, sought to articulate novel relationships to the self.
A tradition stretching from Descartes aims to reach deep into the self in order to transcend the self: what Peter Gordon, channeling Adorno, described as “subjectivism yearning for the solidity of the object”. This seminar on ‘The self as material’ means to embrace both sides of this subject–object dialectic. We welcome papers that discuss turns toward ‘the self’ as the referential material of art works in any genre or medium. Equally, we seek papers referring to treatment of the self as embedded and imbricated in a materialist idea of the world: the self as a locus of material facts and forces, as habitus, or as the centre of sensory experience and the basis of empirical reality.
Papers should be short (approx. 5pp.), propositional, and schematic, forming a basis for lively discussion and juxtaposition.
Queer, Weird, and Otherwise Non-Canonical Modernisms
Leaders: Dr. Elizabeth Blake (Clark University), Dr. Elizabeth Anderson (University of Aberdeen)
Feminist, queer, and trans scholarship has often worked to revise and expand the canon, and proffered ways to reread and rethink even the most canonical of texts. After all, as Eve Sedgwick advised us thirty-five years ago in Epistemology of the Closet, “the relationship of gay studies to the canon is, and had best be, tortuous.” This axiom is no less applicable to modernist studies, where scholars of anti- or non-canonical modernisms have often found themselves classified as doing modernism otherwise, always with an adjective appended (new, bad, weak, global, etc). The “weird” opens up another way of thinking against the mainstream of modernist studies, and we take it as a call not only to be attuned to the innate weirdness of texts themselves, but also to texts that are weirdly-suited to the ways we have come to understand modernism (perhaps even, in some cases, because their work is “not weird enough”). We invite papers that bring feminist, queer, and trans approaches to non-canonical modernist figures, texts, and objects, and are especially interested in papers focusing on:
- Underread or under-studied authors
- Authors whose work is out of print, or has not been translated into English
- The never published works of feminist, queer, and/or trans modernists
- Authors whose work is contemporaneous to, but rarely considered part of, modernism
The Harlem Renaissance in Circulation
Leaders: Dr. Adam McKible (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), Dr. Suzanne W. Churchill (Davidson College), Dr. Rachel Farebrother (Swansea University)
The Harlem Renaissance has long anchored histories of modernism and Black cultural expression in a narrow geography—chiefly around Harlem and the publishing world of New York City. Yet the vitality of the Renaissance lay not in a fixed location but in its circulation: through print networks outside of New York, migration routes that stretch beyond the paths of South to North, correspondences across linguistic and cultural divides, and performance circuits that connected Black artists, editors, and readers across regions and oceans.
We invite participants for “The Harlem Renaissance in Circulation” seminar. To this end, we seek short position papers that approach the Harlem Renaissance as a dynamic system of movement—of people, texts, and ideas—rather than as a place-bound era in Black literature and culture. We seek work that maps how New Negro writers and intellectuals published, traveled, and corresponded through alternative geographies of modernity, or/or networks of periodicals, publishers, and archives.
We particularly welcome contributions that explore:
- Print and publication networks: magazines, anthologies, and presses that shaped or escaped Harlem’s orbit.
- Editorial and epistolary circulation: correspondence, editorial exchange, and literary friendship as engines of modernist production.
- Migration and travel: artists, journalists, and activists whose movements carried the Renaissance’s language and aesthetics across borders.
- Diasporic modernisms: transnational dialogues linking Harlem to larger circuits of Black modernism.
- Archival reconsiderations: new readings of circulation—through fragments, reprints, and rediscovered periodicals—as modes of survival and influence.
By centering circulation as both method and metaphor, this cluster asks: what happens when we follow the Renaissance in motion?
Weird Connections: Modernism & Byzantium
Leaders: Dr. Christos Hadiyiannis (University of Regensburg), Dr. Demet Karabulut Dede (Istanbul Bilgi University)
Modernists were drawn to unexpected connections. One such weird connection was with Byzantium, which for many modernists signalled decline and revival, corruption and rediscovery, imagination and reinvention. The seminar invites papers that examine how modernism engages with the Byzantine Empire across different national and cultural contexts, media and genres, and which offer transnational or comparative perspectives on this underexplored relationship.
- How did cultural materials related to the Byzantine Empire circulate within literary and artistic circles?
- What connections can be drawn between the rise in interest in the Byzantine Empire during the 19thc and the emergence of decadent literature?
- What is the relationship between modernism, nationalism, and the Byzantine Empire?
- In what ways did the Byzantine Empire serve as a cultural and political reference point for the emerging nation-states of the 20th c?
- How was the Byzantine Empire employed as a symbol of political critique or dissent?
- What contemporary artistic works reflect the influence of both Byzantine traditions and modernist aesthetics?
We call for brief position papers (5-7 pages) on any work (including work in progress) that engages with modernism and Byzantium. Papers will be pre-circulated. We will match participants and ask each attendee to respond to one paper.
The seminar will be led by two scholars working within modernism and Byzantine studies who would like to continue building an open and inviting network on modernism & Byzantium. For this seminar, we have invited three responders from Literature and from Byzantine Studies, whom we’ve asked to share with us their most recent work and talk about the challenges of working across periods. The responders are Eleni Kefala (St. Andrews), Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary London), and Tony Paraskeva (Roehampton).
The discussion will be structured, congenial, and inclusive; the organisers are committed to ensuring that everyone gets the chance to speak and to be heard.