Leaders: Claire Battershill, Amy Elkins, and Sheryda Warrener

Oulipo language games, the literary parlour activities of the Bloomsbury group's "memoir club" and other momentary creative collaborative exercises show us the vibrant energy of constraint and play in a shared space. The "prompt" or "provocation" (to use the Black Mountain College term) offers us a chance to engage as contemporary creative practitioners and scholars with the kinds of creativity that is born of formal limitation and of transmedial engagements between and across the arts. When Yoko Ono tells us, for example, in Grapefruit to "break your mirror and scatter the pieces in different countries" she offers both a literal instruction and a sense of speculative poetic impossibility. In this seminar, we invite participants to think about the kinds of prompts, provocations, exercises, and games that modernist literature and artistic practice across media can offer contemporary scholars and creative practitioners. We seek to engage with transmedial praxis as both a conceptual apparatus for studying the period and as a scholarly method—a way of thinking more inclusively and dynamically about the work of scholarship itself. Therefore, this seminar will take an unconventional and deliberately procedural format: we will invite participants to share examples of their own creative/critical engagements with modernist procedural or provocative literature in advance; then, during the session itself, we will spend most of the time engaging in material prompts and provocations inspired by modernist works and will consider the ways in which modernist constructions of creative constraint can offer us new possibilities for making work in the present.

Leaders: Erica Delsandro and Laurel Harris

Even while feminist inquiry has established its importance in modernist studies, the borders between traditional and feminist scholarly practices remain. Feminist scholarship has prompted a questioning of scholarly audience, subject, and media that has been particularly responsive to radical institutional shifts in the humanities. At the same time, this scholarship has often been perceived as niche or eccentric in traditional academic contexts. In this seminar, participants will reflect on who they hope to reach and what they hope to do with their scholarship. Feminist publication is often migratory, seeking new venues and receptive communities. In this seminar, we will explore where and how we find, create, and shape these spaces.

Seminar participants will not produce position papers for this seminar; rather, they will respond to a series of shared prompts, creating a collective text addressing the questions below. We welcome scholars who are or have been in editing roles–journal editors, series editors, guest editors, etc.--who can speak to feminist praxis as well as anyone interested in exploring forms of and venues for feminist scholarship.

If you had the time and space to write whatever you liked, would the genres in which you write, the audience for whom you write, and/or the subjects on which you write shift?

Is there anything important to you that you have started to write but stopped because you didn’t know where it would go?

Which publication venues–if any–most fit the scholarship you do or would like to do, and why?

To what extent do you think feminist scholarship should challenge traditional forms and genres and why?

How would you describe an ideal publication venue for explicitly feminist work?

How can we reimagine the academic peer review and publishing process to more closely align with contemporary (intersectional and anti-racist) feminist goals and ideals?

How do we articulate and advocate for the value of work that is non-traditional in terms of genre, audience, and/or subjects?

Leaders: Jess Shollenberger and Laura Tscherry

Invited participant: Melanie Micir

Intimacy is both a feeling and a spatial or formal arrangement. As a method for modernist studies, intimacy enables a range of approaches to difficult, unruly objects—those resistant to repair and, as often, integration into field formations, political frameworks, histories, and canons. For example: the “terrible we” of maladjusted, backward figures trans studies has had to disavow to gain legitimacy as a field (Awkward-Rich, The Terrible We); the Black and sometimes queer “minor figures” who, in the afterlife of slavery and as a matter of survival, transformed gender, sexuality, and domestic and intimate life (Hartman, Wayward Lives); and the biographical “passion projects” of modernist women writers bent on crafting alternative histories that would include their lovers and friends (Micir, The Passion Projects).

In this seminar, we seek to explore how intimate practices of research, reading, and writing have been useful and remain crucial to minoritarian studies and specifically Black, queer, trans, feminist, and disability studies approaches to the study of modernism. What does it mean to fall in love with a text, to cathect to or (mis)recognize its latent or overt queer/trans/crip/BIPOC possibilities? Alongside love, investment, fantasy, and the legitimizing power of proximity and attention, what might intimacy enable us to unlearn and disrupt about our objects and our disciplines?

We welcome papers that probe the intellectual roots of intimate scholarship (in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project or Barthes’s S/Z, for example) and/or chart pathways for its future in and beyond modernist studies. We acknowledge the work being done to “deidealize” objects of study in minoritarian fields, yet we remain curious about the potentials and potential failures of intimacy configured as a mode of critical practice (Amin, Disturbing Attachments).

Leaders: Christine Fouirnaies and Christos Hadjiyiannis

Invited responders: Alejandra Uslenghi and Emily Setina

From its origins in the nineteenth century through to its many developments and reconfigurations over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, photography has intrigued and invigorated literary practice, providing writers with fresh and different opportunities for expression. At the same time, the coming together of writing and photography (a link made obvious by the term’s etymology: writing with light) became a lens through which literary and media theorists sought to see the world – and engage with it.

This seminar would consider the coming together of literature and photography during the broad modernist era and across different geographies, genres, and languages. What has photography afforded modernist literature? What new things did photography make possible to say? What radical new ways of seeing, representing, and constructing the world has photography presented for modernist writers and readers? What joins modernist writing and photography? What keeps them apart? How did modernist literature respond to advancements in photographic technology?

This panel will be led by two scholars working within modernism and photography and who are at the early stages of editing a companion on the subject. For this seminar, we call for brief position papers (5-7 pages) on any work (including work in progress) that engages with modernism and photography. These papers will be pre-circulated, we will match participants, and ask each seminar attendee to respond to one paper on the day. We are also delighted to have with us two leaders in the field as invited participants who have been asked to share with us their most recent work and talk about the state of the field.

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.

It is the organisers' hope that many participants would be interested in being part of the edited companion the organisers are planning.

Leader: Josh Epstein

This seminar proposes to explore the modernist melodrama—and the relationship between “modernism” and “melodrama” as cultural categories—highlighting the performative dimensions of modernism and the avant-garde. Building on a resurgent critical interest in the melodrama—among them, Ben Singer on the “modernity thesis”; Carolyn Williams and Peter Kivy on melodrama and realist fiction; Ben Kohlmann on Auden and Isherwood; Linda Williams on race melodramas and “body genres”; Victoria Evans on Douglas Sirk—we will consider how melodramas stage the conflicted affects of modernity, and inform modernism even (especially?) at its most neoclassical. Questions we ask may include: How do melodramas of race (e.g. Micheaux, Griffith, Fleming/Selznick, Stahl, Sirk) capitalize on or critique the genre’s emotional excesses in thinking through historicity and national community; in what ways do these texts question the politics of sentiment? In what respects are avant-garde manifestos a rhetorical or typographical approximation of melodramatic performance? To what effect do modernist representations of labor, class, and consumer culture counterpoint images of the workplace with those of sentimentalized domesticity? How do modernist representations of sexuality, reproduction, and abortion complicate the melodrama’s domestic sensibilities (e.g. Lois Weber’s Where Are My Children; Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark; Mina Loy’s The Sacred Prostitute); in what ways does modernist melodrama evoke a queer “aesthetics of impossibility” (Jonathan Goldberg)? How do opera, the stage or film musical, the Singspiel, the radio ballad, Joyce’s “Circe” episode, or Schoenberg’s serialist song cycle Pierrot lunaire reflect alternative approaches to the melos in melodrama? How do documentary and propaganda across media both resist and partake in melodramatic sentimentality? How do film representations of modernist texts highlight or distort their latent or explicit melodramatics? Papers on any genre, medium, or period are welcome; perspectives on late Victorian or postmodern melodrama would throw into relief the elasticity of our central terms.

Leaders: Michelle Witen and Kiron Ward

This seminar will address the relationships between migration, cultural production, and Modernist literature, reading them alongside the multinational production of popular commodities such as comestibles, textiles, fabrics, organic and inorganic materials.

Building on our recent and ongoing work on cocoa and tea (i.e., the cultural impact of Cadbury’s activities in Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean), we are looking to unite and expand a network of researchers who wish to revisit and reconsider the ways that the emergent logic of commodity culture at the fin de siècle have shaped what we have come to understand as global modernism. This seminar touches upon recent scholarship in areas such as the environmental humanities, plantation studies, object-oriented ontology, nonhuman studies, food studies, and critical labour studies.

Some of our motivating questions could include, but are not limited to: how can tracing the migration patterns of people through commodity culture be read alongside Modernist literature? How can the archives of companies, like Rowntree’s, Tate & Lyle, Tetley, and others, can be used to recontextualise modernist cultural production from a global perspective? How does the tea-off between Barry’s and Lyons emerge in modernist advertisements and (Irish) literature? How can migration and trading patterns be read alongside piracy and what place does this have in the rise of pirate literature? Can tracking the movement of objects, materials, resources, specific foodstuffs, fabrics, minerals, etc. be read palimpsestually in literature? etc.

Leader: Marius Hentea

In the long tradition of reading modernism through the framework of the decade (the decadent 1890s, the avant-garde 1920s, the politicized 1930s), the 1940s is a conspicuous absence. Was there such a thing as 1940s literature? What was it? Is it possible to think of 1940s literature when the decade was, in effect, cut in two by the end of the war (for some) in 1945? This seminar seeks to understand the varieties of artistic and literary production within the 1940s, a decade that oscillated between the extremes of war and peace, revolution and retreat, destruction and reconstruction. The seminar hopes to expand the ambit of significant 1940s literary production beyond the long shadow of war literature or the generic category of ‘late modernism’. While seminal works have been written on 1940s print culture stalwarts like Horizon or Partisan Review, this seminar would also be keen to consider what the 1940s meant outside the Atlantic metropolitan framework (literary value and production in the context of nascent anti-colonial movements, Partition, American military occupations, Stalinization in Eastern Europe, international law and international institutions, etc.). Contributions on such topics as 1940s film, the academic study of modernism within the academy, the GI bill, ethnic literatures in America and elsewhere, literary-critical reevaluations like New Criticism, and global circulation of texts within the decade would also be welcome. The aim of the seminar is to rethink what the 1940s can look like as a ‘literary decade’. Does it make sense to conceptualize a category like 1940s literature? Or was that decade simply too capacious, too varied in its move from war to peace to cold war, to be contained within a single frame?

Leaders: Hayley O’Malley and Jonathan Foltz

In his book-length essay on film, The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin recounts how going to the movies in the 1930s not only introduced him to the exhilarating (and mendacious) screen worlds of Hollywood cinema, but also opened up the wider possibilities of what he evocatively calls “the cinema of my mind”—the alternative aesthetics and narratives that he imagined could take place on screen. To explore those possibilities, Baldwin frequently turned to fiction, using literature to articulate and project new visions of film and film culture, from the highly interiorized scenes of film spectatorship in his novels Go Tell it On the Mountain and Another Country to his illustrated children’s book Little Man, Little Man, in which the young protagonist imagines his Harlem city block as a movie. In reclaiming the public act of spectatorship as a literary mode, Baldwin was not alone. Writers from the modernist period to the present have sought to rethink the formal and political possibilities of poetry and prose through acts of intermedial translation. From Gertrude Stein’s “films” and Federico García Lorca’s “screenplays” to the fiction of Kathleen Collins, writers have transformed the page into a “cinema of [the] mind,” recasting cinematic styles, repurposing cinematic practices, and proposing alternative systems of film production.

This seminar looks to this rich history of imaginary cinema to ask a series of interlocking questions. What particular techniques, genres, and literary spaces have writers employed to imagine or reimagine the film medium, and what have been the aesthetic, social, and political stakes of those projects? If literary writers began writing with and against the movies as soon as they appeared, how might we periodize those practices, either in relation to the history of literary modernism or to the wider media histories in which it was embedded? In what ways have technological changes—from synch sound to the rise of television—impacted literary imaginations of cinema? And looking beyond the literary, what other imaginary cinemas can we find in mediums such as music, painting, and scrapbooking—practices that Pavle Levi calls “cinema by other means”—and how do those compare to their literary counterparts?

Perhaps most importantly, this seminar asks participants to think methodologically about the utility of different approaches—e.g., historical, historicist, theoretical, materialist, speculative—for illuminating the ideas, practices, and stakes of imagined cinemas. Modernist studies has long been attuned to the dynamic interplay between literature and film (e.g., Laura Marcus, Susan McCabe, Charlene Regester, and Lara Fiegel), and new work in the field continues to make cross-arts entanglements a vital site for scholarly inquiry (e.g., Pardis Dabashi, Alix Beeston, and Sarah Gleeson-White). This seminar builds on that tradition within modernist studies by inviting collective dialogue about new sites for and approaches to thinking about literature and film together. Participants will be asked to write a short position paper (5-7 pages) or develop an alternative project (e.g., syllabus, video essay, digital mapping project).

Leaders: Elizabeth Blake and Aimee Armande Wilson

“Queer theory has always been a theory of kinship,” argue Teagan Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman in Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (2022), noting further that these entwined theories “have much to contribute to ongoing debates about formalism and the politics of aesthetics.” The political extremes of the early twentieth century and the formal and aesthetic ideals of modernism make these debates particularly salient to modernist studies, and the inclusion of Freud, with his temporal and ideological links to modernism, in Bradway and Freeman’s list of “foundational texts of queer studies” invites further reflection on the role of queer kinship in modernist literature, history, and theory. We are particularly interested in papers that challenge the white, heteronormative principles through which kinship in modernism is often understood, and invite papers that consider modernist queerness in relation to topics such as:

Alternative forms of kinship, chosen family, and family abolition

Interrupted kinship occasioned by birth control, abortion, miscarriage, infertility, impotence, murder, or warfare

“Fictional kinship,” which refers to literary constructions of genealogy that rely on storytelling and the imagination to re-write biological kinship

Kinship beyond the human

The centrality of genealogical bloodlines to fascist, eugenicist, and white supremacist ideologies

Marriage, divorce, and other domestic configurations, including Boston marriages, female husbands, and other queer and trans unions

Representations of illegitimacy and bastardy

Pregnancy, childbirth, the postpartum period, parenthood

Leaders: Ria Banerjee and Anushka Sen

Chicago, the location of this conference, is frequently described as a city of neighborhoods. This phrase signals the distribution of the city’s material structures as well as its affective knots of pride, belonging, and anxiety. This seminar not only confronts the political importance of neighborhoods, but also takes up modernist tools to trouble the idea of the neighborhood as a self-contained and knowable entity. The twentieth-century marks a view of the village or countryside as a space in crisis, and indeed in tense relationship to the metropolitan city. Zora Neale Hurston’s lively depictions of Eatonville on the one hand, and New York on the other, suggest the visible antagonisms between village and city (Hurston chose the village) do not necessarily imply a separation of worlds; rather, they are materially connected by flows of migration that continue in both directions. While such analyses effectively texture the spaces of the village or city as dynamic entities co-constituting each other, the smaller unit of the neighborhood sometimes remains under-theorized in its relationship to migration. There is abundant scholarship on modernist neighborhoods as networks such as the Harlem literati and Bloomsbury. However, we are interested in theorizing neighborhoods through a wider range of terms and ideas, in the hope that it will illuminate neglected dimensions of modernist migration, such as authors' relationship to gentrification, or the movement of unhoused people and animals.

What exactly are modernism’s neighborhoods beyond overfamiliar spatial markers, and how do they survive, enact, as well as stifle migratory movement? We know of modernism’s scrutiny of the domestic interior and its fascination with the teeming cosmopolitan city, but does it engage seriously with the neighborhood’s ambiguous status between walls and sprawl? Can a neighborhood be a community in the sense that so many alienated individuals crave in neoliberal times, or is it fated to gentrification and policing? What might modernism tell us? The following topics, among others, are welcome:

“Authenticity,” cosmopolitanism, and gentrification

Housing, shelters, and neighborhood organizations

Performing neighborhood politics

Neighborhood tourism, voyeurism, and the exotic

Neighborhoods in colonial or global south cities

The ecology of neighborhoods

Neighborhood rumors, gossip, fugitivity, and policing

Format: Participants who sign up will be asked to first share their abstracts approximately a month before the conference, and then to submit a short paper by a deadline a week or two in advance of the conference dates. Everyone will be invited to read each other’s work ahead of time, but we will ask participants to focus on the papers in their particular group, which we will set up according to the abstracts.

At the seminar itself, we plan to allot a few minutes for each group to present their experience of reading each other’s work. Once each group does so, we will collectively try to identify the patterns, stakes and most pressing questions that emerge from our projects, and collectively discuss them.

Leaders: Robert Higney and Lisa Mendelman

Invited responders: Marta Filgerowicz and Swati Rana

Modernism’s investments in character have a high-profile history, from E. M. Forster’s flat and round distinctions and Zora Neale Hurston’s analysis of the “characteristics” of Black art and expression, to Virginia Woolf’s transformation in human character “on or about December 1910.” Early twentieth-century culture featured a range of iconic figures, including the flapper, the dandy, the “it girl,” the New Negro and New Negro woman, the U.S. Filipino immigrant, the alcoholic, and the delinquent. Appropriately, character has become an increasingly salient term in modernist and twentieth-century scholarship, with a number of recent monographs and special issues on the topic (e.g. Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi’s Character [2019], Swati Rana’s Race Characters [2020], ASAP/J’s “The Character of Literary Criticism” [2021]). Our seminar extends these recent discussions, with a particular interest in the tensions that inhere in notions of both “modernism” and “character.”

How does characterization work as a reading practice, a component of scholarly argument, and a key term in the history and theory of aesthetic forms? How does character engage with race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other aspects of embodied identity? How can literary critics attend to character’s valences across disciplines and media formats—from, say, film studies to literary studies to political theory? Where does character intersect with collective and nonhuman forms like networks, institutions, and infrastructure? What moral, ethical, and political traces does character retain in the contemporary academy, and what implicit and explicit roles has it played in ongoing critical debates?

We invite position papers that consider these or other questions. We are especially interested in approaches that elucidate how character bridges the social and formal, the individual and the collective, embodiment and abstraction—and those that, in Woolf’s words, might help us “to live a single year of life without disaster.”

Leaders: Adam McKible and Louise Kane

Almost two decades since Sean Latham and Robert Scholes proclaimed the “rise of periodical studies,” a host of publications and collaborative initiatives have explored modernist magazines and periodicals through innovative approaches. From the use of digital humanities and computational methods, to international partnerships such as the Transnational Periodical Cultures (TPC) research group based at the University of Mainz, we find ourselves in a periodical renaissance in which plenty of projects continue to develop new ways of looking at old magazines.

Tapping into the renewed energy of these efforts, this seminar invites participants to showcase work and projects that are performing ‘new work in old mags’. The scope of the seminar is broad and interdisciplinary. Participants may wish to share work that touches on (but is by no means limited to) the following questions, many of which may intersect and overlap:

genre: what makes a magazine ‘little’, ‘modernist’, or ‘mass’? What happens when we play with these definitions and the temporal and/or cultural stratifications they connote?

language: applying translation studies or linguistic approaches to the study of mags

magazines and visual culture: transverbal approaches to periodicals

cultural/ national boundaries: projects that approach magazines as borderless or transnational

magazines and media: how can we approach magazines in relation to other media forms?

magazines and interdisciplinarity: what sort of methodologies, borrowed from other disciplines, offer new ways of understanding old texts?

materiality and print culture: magazines as circulating objects, physically produced constructions

magazines and digitization/ archives: projects that create magazine repositories, the ‘magazine’ as etymological storehouse

periodical studies and doubt: the ‘fall’ of periodical studies, how ‘old mags’ present biased/inaccurate accounts of historical events, problematic periodicals

We particularly welcome participants who may be part of collaborative approaches to the study of magazines.

Leaders: Alexander Hartley, Gasira Timir, and Jesse McCarthy

Invited participant: Jesse McCarthy

In the stories writers and critics tell about the forward motion of literary creativity, two terms have loomed large since the era of high modernism: the breakdown and the breakthrough. Breakdown has been a preferred term for the turn to the self, the exposition of shattered subjectivity, the Freudian excavation of the individual unconscious. Breakthrough, conversely, has been associated with the turn to the collective, the assertion of a political imperative, and the Marxian commitment to revealing and changing the fabric of social life.

American lyric poetry at midcentury provides paradigmatic examples of both. A moment of breakdown is Robert Lowell’s ‘confessional’ turn in Life Studies (1959), culminating in his lyric speaker’s exclamation that “my mind’s not right”. A model of breakthrough, by contrast, is found in the newfound Black nationalism of Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca (1968), with its closing exhortation to “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

The relevance of these ‘breaks’ is not confined to any one period and has not ebbed. Contemporary theorists continue to rely on the idea of ‘breakdown’ to characterise racial capitalism today—take, for example, Anna Kornbluh’s discussion of the breakdown of mediation as a central feature of “too late” capitalist life in Immediacy (2024); or alternatively, Fred Moten’s characterisation of the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition in In the Break (2003).

For this seminar, we invite short, propositional papers (5–7 pages) that engage “the breakdown” and/or “the breakthrough” as central topoi. Topics addressed might include any of the aforementioned, from American lyric poetry at midcentury to the Black Arts Movement, the Black Radical tradition, and/or the negation of mediation; alternatively, they might address topics such as: accelerationism and/or accelerationist anxieties; environmental degradation/activism; the psychoanalytic revival; or any other sites of breakdown/breakthrough.

Leaders: Sarah Coogan and Romana Huk

In her 2021 contribution to Douglas Mao’s edited volume addressing The New Modernist Studies, Susan Stanford Friedman asserts the need for new comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies in addressing the relationship between religion and global modernism. While, as Friedman notes, a robust conversation has emerged in recent years surrounding the role of religion in Anglo-American modernism—and in some cases engaging a broader geographical context—much work remains to be done at the intersection of postsecular and postcolonial readings of modernity and modernism(s).

This panel proposes to foster conversation around that significant intersection. Papers might consider: what religion means in a modernist context; the roles narratives of secularization and postsecularism play in modernist studies; the relationship between religion and literary form; and the relationships between religion and colonialism in modernist writing, among many other subjects. We hope that participants will consider both how new methodological approaches to religion might refine our understanding of global modernism, and how modernist writing might illuminate developments in religious studies.

Leaders: Caroline Zoe Krzakowski and Paula Derdiger

War generated some of the most legible migrations that characterize the modernist period. The First and Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the second Sino-Japanese War, and the emerging Cold War involved large-scale movements of military personnel and diplomats, spies, prisoners of war, Holocaust victims, ghetto and internment camp victims, refugees, émigrés, and evacuees.

War also changed the way culture and information traveled across borders and throughout expanding and shifting networks.. Many writers, artists, filmmakers, and journalists migrated as they responded to the exigencies of wartime life – as artists, workers, and citizens. The highly mobile, globalizing realities of modern warfare prompt special attention to the significance of borders and thresholds of all kinds within the modernist period, from the politically constituted borders defining nation states and empires to the physical and terrestrial boundaries within built, infrastructural, and natural environments.

We invite participants who are eager to think through the significance of wartime migration and mobility for modernist studies across the geographic, formal, and disciplinary spectrum.

Potential paper subjects include but are not limited to:

Migrations across formal, disciplinary, or medial boundaries within particular texts or within a group of related texts that reckon with war;

Representations of migration or mobility related to warfare and wartime conditions in literature, visual art, film, performance, or radio;

Cultural artifacts and technologies that are central to the history of wartime migration, such as maps, trains, ships, airplanes, transportation networks, communication technologies, camps, bunkers, bomb shelters;

Biographical, archival, social, or institutional contexts for migrating writers, visual artists, filmmakers, or journalists.

Leaders: Christian Gelder and Vidya Venkatesh

Invited Participants: Beth Blum and Kevin Duong

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a diverse therapeutic imaginary. Alongside Freud’s well-known attempts to liberate desire, the early years of the century also saw the creation of a new set of psychopathologies, the proliferation of a series of therapeutic techniques, and the beginnings of several psychotherapeutic and psychiatric traditions. This period witnessed the explosion of discourses about doctoring, diagnosing and healing, which were accompanied by a range of medicalised accounts of the mind, its sicknesses and capacities for recovery. But the therapeutic imaginary also carried with it a host of often disturbing political questions about the relationship between private psychology and social organization, about mental health and race, and the politics of childhood, adulthood, partnership and procreation. As the rise of urban mass culture increasingly motivated large-scale statistical approaches to human life, the therapeutic imaginary, in all its guises, began to interrogate the possibility of a ‘healthy, happy and efficient’ population, to cite Adolf Meyer’s phrase – one both in keeping and in contradiction with capitalist modernity.

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the connections between modernism and the therapeutic imaginary. How did modernist literature respond to the rise of therapy? How did literary narrative either confirm or resist psychotherapeutic diagnostics? How was the clinical encounter represented in literary writing, and how was literary writing represented in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic medicine? What is the relationship between literature and therapeutic advice? Looking beyond the well-established tendency in modernist literature to theorize consciousness and the mind, how might we read modernist authors as theorists of the (psycho)therapeutic in particular? And finally, what role did literature play in confirming or resisting the politics associated with this imaginary? This seminar invites contributors to respond to these questions or to examine other aspects of modernism’s engagement with therapy.

Leader: Agnes Malinowska

In this seminar, we investigate how recent theoretical developments in queer and trans theory may impact the way we teach, write, and think about gender and sexuality in the cultural and social spaces of modernism and modernity (broadly and globally construed).

Topics of interest include:

How ideas and methods associated with the “temporal turn” in queer theory encourage us to reconsider well-known modernist investments around time, affect, identity, and style

How queer of color critique can help us analyze modernist social formations as situated at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and class—and likewise evaluate how these formations track or diverge from hegemonic and oppressive nationalist ideals and practices

How queer theoretical investments in the wayward, the sideways, the non-linear, non-identitarian, anti-social, and utopian invite us to reimagine modernist accounts of exile, migration, and displacement

How recent historical excavations of queer and trans sexuality and identity re-orient the locations and meanings of “modernity” in gender and sexuality studies. What, for instance, does “modernity” mean for the trans subject (in light of the history of trans medicine)? How might histories of sexual scientific thought ask us to reevaluate modernist sex and gender taxonomies?

How work in biopolitical and necropolitical studies centered on gender and sexuality can help make sense of the modernist management of queer lives and populations

How theories of queer performance and performativity encourage new narratives around the production of modernist identity formations, popular forms of gender display, the circulation of queer affect, and embodied social experience most broadly

How cultural producers working in tandem with developments in gender and sexuality studies—for instance, Black filmmakers associated with the New Queer Cinema movement—have sought to imagine or in some sense recover “queer modernist” lives and scenes that are shrouded in archival silence or apparently lost to history

The seminar welcomes participants invested in teaching, thinking, or writing about any aspect of modernist cultural, social, and aesthetic production or history. Participants interested in cultural objects and scenes that live on the global, political, racial, and economic margins of “queer modernism” are especially encouraged to join. This seminar seeks to include a diverse range of scholars across professional statuses and institutional affiliations.

Each participant will write a brief and informal position paper (~5 pages) that is pre-circulated and read by all participants prior to the conference. The seminar welcomes reflections on pedagogy, scholarship, or some combination of both.

Leaders: Joel Rhone and Chris Gortmaker

Invited participants: Peter Kalliney and Lisa Siraganian

Literary modernism is a story of distinctions and linkages, exclusions and essences. From T.S. Eliot’s tradition of impersonality, Henry James’s “competition with life,” and Virginia Woolf’s “character in itself” to formalist engagements with race in Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, modernism’s critical definitions and artistic creations stake out essences in terms of form, period, place, and ascriptive identity. To map and evaluate the role of essentialist argument in modernist studies, this seminar is organized around two interrelated questions: Should the study of modernism necessarily involve arguments about what counts as a modernist artwork or discourse? How do we balance the explanatory power of essentialist arguments with the exclusions they necessitate?

Further questions for thinking through research methods and pedagogical practices include: What essentialist or anti-essentialist arguments about modernism do you find to be an analytic aid or impediment in your research or, more broadly, in modernist studies as a field? How can historical periodization inform—or not inform—the ways we explain what modernism is? How should we relate the formal or thematic essence of a work—that which may or may not make it modernist—to the ascriptive identity of its author? How should we relate the historically variable politics of modernist artworks to the inclusive/exclusive politics of modernism as a canon?

Leaders: Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton and Naomi Michalowicz

What does the study of modernism and modernist experimentation offer histories of data, data visualization, and information science? To date, literary histories of modernism have prioritized the particular, the unrepresentable, and the ineffable, in contrast to a preoccupation with “type” and statistical average in Victorian realism. Yet the historical period called modernism coincides directly with widespread innovation in methods of social quantification, and what Khalil Muhammad calls “a total revolution in racial data generating technologies.” Indeed, numerous Black and working-class “modernist” authors—George Schuyler, W. E. B. Du Bois, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Ann Petry, Jean Toomer, among others—were entirely preoccupied with the relationship between “statistics and storytelling” (Du Bois). Moreover, the sudden emergence of new data regimes in the early 20th century gave rise to an existential crisis of representation which is, we propose, quintessentially modernist in nature. In light of this claim, we invite papers that explore the relationship between modernist aesthetic innovation and forms of data visualization, data science, data story-telling, modernist plot and data plotting, and the history of the “data” concept.

Leaders: Daniel Raschke and Edward P. Dallis Comentale

This seminar invites participants to ponder on modernity's distinctive discourse networks as they start to migrate, morph, and malfunction during the modernist period and beyond.

Friedrich Kittler's dictum, “Media determine our situation,” sets up a version of modernity continually reconfigured by cultural institutions, bodies of knowledge, transmission concerns, and technological a priori. Per Kittler, in 1800 discourse is shaped by a romantic-classical ethos of subjective intentionality and intimacy, while in 1900, it is produced by random generators, storage devices, and transmission networks with ever more minute and indiscriminate capacities. As a seminar, we hope to map and debate the trajectories of the discourse networks manifesting around the year 2000.

Kittler was interested in dismantling hegemonic institutions and, like Walter Benjamin, he was particularly attentive to those breaks and disjunctures, historical offshoots, most often brought on by malfunctioning or radically misused technologies. Nietzsche wrote “Our writing tools shape our thoughts” finding joy experimenting with his typewriter in the face of disability. Derrida, fond of his Apple Macintosh, once reluctantly admitted that there could be no deconstruction without computers. However, as Balsamo famously observes, information technologies have veiled gendered and racialized undercurrents as both “typewriters” and “computers” were once synonymous with female clerical workers.

Writers, artists, and thinkers from across the globe vehemently resist and meditate on hegemonic technological infrastructures. This seminar invites participants to explore and conceptualize the agents, circuits, and components of discourse networks disrupting and glitching media and information technologies. In particular, we invite participants to consider the mediation and processing of modernist concerns in terms of forms, interfaces, and agency.

Potential inquiries include: What forms might novel discourse networks take? Will they be discerned on the printed page and in the overturning of various literary cults? Or within rectangular windows interfaces and the constant tapping of digital exchange?

Leaders: Clément Oudart and Charlotte Estrade

This seminar seeks to analyze a very specific mode of migration: expatriation. As opposed to the collective nature of migration, expatriation may be seen as an individual form of migration. Whether chosen or endured, for a short or a long span of time, expatriation has been chosen by many modernist writers and artists, from Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton to T.S. Eliot and H.D., who settled permanently in France or in England. Relocation has shaped the life of countless modernists.

To what extent does expatriation offer a decentered frame of analysis or a distanced perception of the US and American identity? How does the length of people’s stay overseas contribute to the shaping of their work, be it poetry, fiction, drama or other, more hybrid generic forms? Indeed, one should make a distinction between writers whose expatriation was definitive (T.S. Eliot or H.D. offer a case in point) and those for whom expatriation took multiple stages (e.g. Mina Loy, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound). For many, expatriation was a temporary yet memorable stage of their career: for Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, ee cummings, Langston Hughes, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, expatriation(s) constituted formative moments, both personally and artistically. In contrast, one may also consider their choice in light of those Americans who notably resisted moving to Europe, such as William Carlos Williams (who had studied in Geneva and Paris) and William Faulkner.

This seminar will explore the stakes of American transatlantic expatriation namely in relation with migration, exile, networks, communities, colonies, racism, xenophobia, homesickness, tourism, cosmopolitanism, international modernism, individual and collective transnational experience.