Seminars

Seminars

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.  

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

Anthologies, Exhibitions, and Festivals

Leaders: Jim Cocola (Worcester Polytechnic Institute); J.D. Porter (University of Pennsylvania)

Invited participant: Brendan Kredell (Oakland University)

The anthology, the exhibition, and the festival share in common a function as forms of collecting—for works of literature, visual art, and film, respectively—that offer a vital component in the infrastructural apparatus of modernism. In this seminar we aim to put the canon-making and canon-breaking infrastructures of the literary and visual arts into dialogue with one another. Thinking through the aesthetics and politics of these institutions in their censorious, gate-keeping, generation-defining, and movement-establishing manifestations, we encourage attention to anthologies including the various editions of Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry and the several associated volumes of the Norton Anthology, as well as exhibitions and festivals such as the Armory Show, the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial.

Pre-circulated position papers of 5-7 pages might address the topics above, or might turn more specifically to the role of key modernist figures who have served as anthology editors, exhibition curators, and festival jurors, such as Alfred Stieglitz, James Weldon Johnson, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, and Barbara Haskell. Emphases might also center on more recently emerging anthology, exhibition, and festival practices that have retrospectively and proactively shaped the currents, legacies, and afterlives of modernism. We welcome scholars from art history, film studies, literary studies, and beyond, seeking work committed to approaches and methods of various kinds, with particular interest in computational studies, digital humanities analyses, pedagogical reflections, reception histories, and textual criticism, as well as work inflected and informed by critical race theory, ethnic studies, feminist critique, reader-response criticism, and urban studies, among other lenses. Pre-circulated data sets and materials connected to digital humanities initiatives are also welcome.

"Anywhere but the Harlem Renaissance”

Leaders: Adam McKible (CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice); Eve Dunbar (Vassar College)

Invited participant: Paul J. Edwards (New York University)

Named the “Harlem Renaissance” well after the fact, the explosion of African American creativity and political activism of the interwar years was never confined only to the northern reaches of Manhattan. The Renaissance was, in fact, a global phenomenon with roots in the US and branches throughout the world. The “Anywhere but the Harlem Renaissance” seminar invites papers that explore New Negro creativity, experience, and/or politics outside of the United States and in other American locations.

There is a long tradition of skepticism of the movement’s association with Harlem. The poet Sterling A. Brown – who wrote Southern Road (1932), a landmark collection that developed a vernacular modernism rooted in travel, folklore, labor, and migration in the US South – regarded Harlem as the “show-window, the cashier’s till, but no more Negro America than New York is America.” Since then, scholarship that de-centers Harlem has taken two main forms. First, it has focused on Black cultural expression and political activism in US urban centers outside New York—including Chicago and Washington D.C.—and cultural networks, such as the circle around the poet Anne Spencer in Lynchburg, Virginia. Secondly, it has mapped the transnational and diasporic contours of New Negro cultural expression and politics in places as far-flung as Mexico City, Havana, Kingston, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Colón, and London.

TThere is nothing new about the desire to “escape from New York,” as Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani termed it in 2013, but the time is ripe for a reassessment of the Renaissance’s regional, national, and transnational dimensions. Indeed, recent years have seen unprecedented attention to New Negro creativity, activism, and cultural networks in the US South, a focus that sometimes also necessitates attention to the movement’s transnational and diasporic scope. We welcome papers that explore the Renaissance—in anywhere but Harlem.

Asias in the Americas: Performances, Exhibitions, Archives, Repertoires

Leaders: Christopher Bush (Northwestern University); Carrie Preston (Boston University)

Works such as Amir Mufti’s Forget English! (2016) have demonstrated the powerful and persistent links between philology and Orientalism, highlighting the myriad ways in which textual interpretation—however critical in intent—builds on and remains indebted to the institutions and infrastructures of empire. This is most obviously the case when the object of knowledge is colonized and the forms of knowing committed to the use of a hegemonic language, perhaps the hegemonic language, English.

As a counterexample, we might consider the wealth of recent scholarship in Latin American studies on that region’s long-term relationship to Asia, particularly East Asia and the Pacific. Here the objects of knowledge relate to very different colonial histories, and the forms of knowing are not in English, but in languages with their own complex inter-imperial histories. More broadly, much of this scholarship has emphasized the relationship between textual interpretation and para- or extra-textual forms of cultural circulation, from material culture and music to foodways and gestures. In a recent review essay, Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez uses the concept of “critical infrastructure” to bring into dialogue scholarship on topics as diverse as Latin American Maoism and the politics of disability in the Philippines.

WThe richness of these counterexamples suggests the possibility of revisiting even the most seemingly paradigmatic examples of “Orientalism” as a regime of knowledge production and control elsewhere. Keeping in mind the prominence of Asian art in Boston museums and the historical centrality of “the China Trade” to nearby Salem, our seminar will explore some of the diverse ways in which knowledge of Asia has been embodied in the Americas. While not leaving behind philology and its critics, we will focus on alternative histories and alternative models of knowing.

Bureaucratic Infrastructures

Leaders: Caroline Z. Krzakowski (Northern Michigan University); Nissa Ren Cannon (Stanford University)

If infrastructure has often been characterized as “boring,” its close-relation, bureaucracy, has a reputation for being even more so. Yet, at the moment, the stakes could not be higher for either of these structures, both nationally and globally. From the dismantling of the central infrastructures of governments, to the destruction of the archival records that undergird, in Marlene Manoff’s words, “the existence of democratic society,” we are living in a world where these topics have assumed a new urgency, dominating our news cycles and threatening our everyday lives.

TThis seminar examines the social and cultural productions that are made possible by modernist bureaucratic infrastructures, as well as the conditions that call for new bureaucratic systems. Both infrastructure and bureaucracy become visible by producing vast amounts of tangible records, documents, and paperwork. Although bureaucracy has its roots in the nineteenth century, modernism comes of age as both governmental and non-governmental institutions and infrastructures—cultural agencies, publishers, insurance companies, funding bodies, and migration controls— adapt and respond to a new set of conditions created by the advent of new technologies, globalization, war, and human migration.

We welcome papers that approach modernist bureaucratic infrastructures from a broad geographic scope using examples, case studies, or theoretical approaches. Some topics for consideration could include, but are not limited to:

• The relationship between infrastructure and bureaucracy
• Narratives made possible (or impossible) by new bureaucratic infrastructures
• Representations of bureaucratic structures and of bureaucrats
• The cultural or political values inherent in infrastructures and institutions
• Causality and paperwork
• Bureaucratic entanglements with extraction practices, environmental degradation, and colonial expansion.
• Feminist and anti-racist approaches to studies of bureaucratic infrastructures

The Business of Poetry

Leaders: Melissa Girard (Loyola University, Maryland) and Karen Leick (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Invited participant: Melissa Bradshaw (Loyola University, Chicago)

Taking our cue from Harriet Monroe’s observation that the average poet earned only $200 a year from their poetry, this seminar invites participants to showcase work and projects that investigate the economic and financial infrastructures of modernist poetry, broadly conceived. How did poets earn a living throughout the long modernist era and what can their careers teach us about the public life of poetry? Participants may wish to share work that addresses (but is by no means limited to) the following topics, many of which may intersect and overlap:

• Cases of commercial, popular, and/or profitable poetry;
• How books, periodicals, anthologies, and other media helped poets earn an income;
• What archival research reveals about financial negotiations between publishers, editors, and poets;
• The relation between commercial and prestige economies for poetry;
• Institutional grants and fellowship support for poets and poetry;
• Private patronage for poets and sources of private funding or partnerships for the art;
• Poets’ varied careers and “side hustles” both within and outside the academy;
• The incorporation of modernist poetry in the academy and/or the past and future influence of university teaching on modernist poetry;
• Cases of poets who faced financial hardship, economic precarity, and poverty;
• ow race, gender, and class affected the career prospects of individual poets and/or the financial viability of the art form;
• How renewed assaults on funding for universities and public institutions are reorienting our perspectives on the business of modernist poetry.

Defensible Anthropocentrisms

Leaders: Siân White (James Madison University); Paul Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania)

Anthropocentrism: a ubiquitous keyword with a bewildering spectrum of meanings. In the earliest use of it recorded by the OED, in 1897, it was simply the masculine counterpart to gynocentrism. But in the early twentieth century, as species eclipsed gender as its centered term, the word’s meanings proliferated. For some, anthropocentrism came to be a normative term for the view that only humans were intrinsically valuable. For others, it was a descriptive term for concepts that centered the human but made no value statements about that centrality. For still others it was a perceptual term for paradigms grounded in human bodies and their sensoria. And a thousand more anthropocentrisms bloomed inside and beside these.

In this seminar we’ll ask, first, what anthropocentrisms we find exhibited, articulated, and debated in modernist works, many of which wrestle with the parameters of the human and the geometry of its relation to its others. Second, we’ll ask which of these modernist anthropocentrisms we might consider defensible, whether normatively, descriptively, or perceptually. Today, the dominant sense of anthropocentrism is as a synonym for anthroposupremacy. It’s time to ask, are there are ways of centering the human that don’t participate in species chauvinism? If so, how do those weaker anthropocentrisms engage, in their turn, with other logics and categories of difference?

We invite brief position papers (5-7 pages) on any work (including work in progress) that engages these questions. These papers will be pre-circulated and read by all participants prior to the conference.

Diagnosis and/as Modernist Practice

Leaders: Robert Volpicelli (Randolph Macon College); Emily Bloom (Sarah Lawrence College)

This seminar explores the cultures and histories of diagnostic practices, especially as they developed and changed around the institutionalization of modern medicine at the turn of the last century. What infrastructures emerged to identify and standardize forms of alterity and illness, and how do these forms influence modernist aesthetics and critical practices? We are eager to take up questions having to do with how diagnostic practices were used in shaping categories of human difference related to gender, sexual orientation, race, and disability. Such thinking will then inform discussions of the representation of diagnostic practices and/or categories within art and literature from the modernist period, broadly defined.

Additionally, participants will be prompted to think about diagnosis as an interpretive framework applied to art and literature by readers and critics both inside and outside academia. On this last point, the seminar will ask questions along the following lines: What are the consequences of trying to diagnose characters within a text? What should we make of the urge to read aesthetic elements as symptoms? What are the practical and ethical limitations of such diagnostic exercises? What is the relationship between close reading and diagnostics? In putting forward such questions, the seminar hopes to distill something about the workings of diagnosis as a set of hermeneutic practices as well as to better understand how such practices sit alongside other theories and methodologies of interpretation.

Following the usual seminar model, participants will be asked to submit brief position papers (5-7 pages) that speak to the issues outlined above. These papers may be standalone essays or contextualized excerpts from longer works. Paper topics include but are not limited to:

• the culture and history of diagnostic categories within modern medicine
• the social, material, and technological infrastructures of diagnosis
• the representation of diagnostic categories at the turn of the century and afterward
• diagnosis as a narrative structure and/or element of plot
• the lived experiences surrounding diagnosis within life writing and/or memoir
• past and present efforts to diagnose artists and authors from the modernist period
• practices of diagnostic reading from psychoanalysis to the medical humanities
• the status of diagnosis within feminist, queer, and disability studies and/or theories

Prior to the conference, the seminar leaders will then circulate these papers, along with notes and questions for discussion, to all participants.

Ecologizing Modernist Infrastructures: Forms and Methods for Regenerative Futures

Leaders: Anne Raine (University of Ottawa); William Kupinse (University of Puget Sound); Sookyoung Lee (St. Lawrence University)

If “to be modern is to live infrastructurally,” our current moment raises urgent questions about how to defend public infrastructures from neglect and privatization (Rubenstein et al. 578), while also mobilizing resistance against the invasive infrastructures of fossil capital and proposing “alternative visions of infrastructure” that recognize the world-making activities of nonhuman life (Johnson and Nemser 1; Krieg et al.). As the infrastructures of modern academic and social life crumble around us, under siege from neoliberal austerity and right-wing populism as well the worsening impacts of climate change, how can we renovate our research, teaching, and service work to resist oppressive and exclusionary infrastructures, defend and repair those that contribute to collective well-being and multispecies flourishing, or inhabit and repurpose the detritus of modernity’s “broken world,” “making use of fissures and flaws to build the conditions for other forms of life to emerge” (Johnson and Nemser 7)?

This Modernism & Environment SIG-sponsored seminar invites participants to share works in progress of any kind--position papers or notes from the field, personal or methodological reflections, teaching ideas or plans for community engagement projects, or anything else that connects modernist studies with environmental justice or climate action. Like the hands-on workshop our SIG is also sponsoring, the seminar will encourage participants to think about how the principles of slowness, fluidity, and plurality inherent to modernist reading, writing, and media production offer alternatives to modern infrastructural models that generate both human disposability and ecological waste. Our goal is to open a space for collaborative discussion, brainstorming, resource-sharing, and community-building around how modernist studies can contribute to broader efforts to renovate, resist, defend, repair, critically reinhabit, or propose alternatives to the infrastructures we’ve inherited.

Suggested reading:

• Johnson, Adriana Michele Campos, and Daniel Nemser, “Introduction: Reading for Infrastructure.” Social Text, vol. 40, no. 4, Dec. 2022, pp. 1–16.
• Rubenstein, Michael, Bruce Robbins and Sophia Beal. “Infrastructuralism: An Introduction.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 4, Winter 2015, pp. 575–86.
• Krieg, Lisa, Maan Barua and Josh Fisher. “Ecologizing Infrastructure: Infrastructural Ecologies.” Society + Space, Nov. 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/ecologizing-infrastructure-infrastructural-ecologies.
• LeMenager, Stephanie. “The Humanities After the Anthropocene.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, Routledge, 2017, pp. 489-97.
• Levine, Caroline. The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis. Princeton UP, 2023.

Fascisms Old and New—Remnant Infrastructures, New Irruptions

Leaders: Madelyn Detloff (Miami University); Erin G. Carlston (University of Auckland)

What is the infrastructure of fascism? How might understanding fascist infrastructures of the 20th century help us to negotiate 21st century political movements that repurpose remnants of modernist-era Fascism? What are the implications of either using the term fascism to describe 21st century political movements, or prohibiting its use? What tools does modernist studies provide for identifying fascist infrastructures? what lessons for resisting the lure of fascist ideology, for community building, for survival? Are there negative lessons from modernism(s) that might show us strategies, actions, or inactions to avoid or challenge?

This seminar invites participants to contribute 5 to 7 - page (1200-2000 - word) essays prompted by these questions. As the conference description notes, infrastructures can be regarded capaciously as material, symbolic, affective, communal, historical, and/or ecological.

Papers are encouraged to be speculative in tone and generative of a rich interchange of ideas with our seminar participants. The seminar will be an open discussion among participants, with the seminar leaders providing moderation to ensure equitable participation if necessary.

Feminism, Disability, and Modernist Accessibility

Leaders: Karen Weingarten (Queens College, CUNY); Kate Schnur (Queens College, CUNY)

In Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sara Ahmed coined the term “sweaty concept” to describe how we labor when confronted with difficulty. The metaphorical sweat she references comes from the work of describing “a body that is not at home in the world,” a body that has been marginalized, ostracized, or declared unworthy for any number of reasons, including gender, race, sexuality, and disability. This work is hard– strenuously hard–because putting these experiences into words challenges everything we know about ourselves, our environments, and our place in this world. Ahmed then tells us, “The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty” (13). That same year, in Academic Ableism (2017), Jay Dolmage used a different analogy to describe difficulty. For Dolmage, “steep steps” works as a powerful symbol and concrete example of the ways universities “keep certain bodies and minds out.” Dolmage points out that “spaces convey information” about who is and is not welcome within them, which in turn shapes how scholars conceive of their work in academic spaces.

Topics/ themes seminar papers might address are: the embodied demands of “difficulty” and how modernists depict and interrogate those demands; modernist difficulty at the intersection of gender and disability; modernist literature’s relationship to its audience; and re-imaginings of modernist criticism through the intersection of feminist and disability studies method/ politics/ activism.

We will ask participants to submit short (five pages or fewer) essays at least one week before the seminar’s meeting time.

Media Infrastructures

Leaders: Steven Nathaniel (Grand Valley State University); Debra Rae Cohen (University of South Carolina)

In “An Encounter” Robert Frost selects an unlikely interlocutor when he asks of a telephone pole, “what’s the news you carry—if you know?” The question foregrounds the provocation of modernist media infrastructure as it infiltrated even the least urbane literary camps, but it also merges two familiar interpretations of the period. Modernism was not only an accumulation of electronic signals and an aggregate of technological materials, but carried news. Operating from an appropriately capacious definition of infrastructure as extending to the undergirding systems, frameworks, and protocols that underlie the cultural institutions and productions of modernism, we invite papers that speak to the architectures, technologies, and habitus of media:

• broadcasting facilities, sound stages, studio backlots, printing plants
• circuitry, cables, hubs, towers
• mixing boards, microphones, newsprint, film stock
• schedules, formats, inventories, writers’ rooms, production hierarchies

Participants are encouraged to focus their attention on the aesthetics that arose from these expansive apparatuses, including those articulated at the levels of the individual and the collective. How did artists situate themselves near and amidst the work of recording, encoding, engineering, and reproducing media? Which forms of creativity emerged through intermedial artifacts or at sites of transduction? What communities arose around new modes of listening, affective techniques, mediaphilia, and fandom? Position papers may address media infrastructure from any of the dimensions outlined above, but in the interest of fostering a generative conversation, we ask that participants tie their research to the broader implications of infrastructural research.

Modernism, Colonization and the Classroom

Leaders: Maebh Long (University of Otago); Matthew Hayward (University of the South Pacific)

From the scheming of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus at Clongowes Wood College to the disillusionment of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man at Tuskegee University, from Ulli Beier’s extra-mural teaching at the University of Nigeria to Albert Wendt’s poetry-filled lectures at the University of the South Pacific, modernism and the classroom have an intimate history in the contest for control and emancipation. Educational spaces have long been the sites of colonial subjection and anticolonial resistance, and modernist literature has played a particularly prominent role, both in the programs of Empire and the playbooks of the insurgents.

Building on the recent pedagogical turn in modernist studies, this seminar explores the relationship between modernism, colonial histories and institutions of learning, both in and outside of the text.We invite participants to consider the ways in which modernist writers, however so defined, represent the educational space as setting, theme or satirical target in their works. Outside of the text, we seek reflections on modernism as an object of study and as a mode of instruction in classrooms across the globe. How did colonial education systems wield modernism as an instrument of Empire? Alternatively, how was modernism utilized by teachers and lecturers committed to decolonization and political independence? And how did writers across settler colonial and decolonizing nations adapt the tools of literary modernism to write new modernities into being?

This seminar accepts a broad understanding of modernism’s periodization, location and form as we believe our conversation will be enriched by the many different ways in which modernism has been taught and translated across space and time. We welcome discussion of writers and movements understood conventionally as modernist as well as movements or situations, from any time or place, that drew on modernisms in any educational context.

Modernism’s Infrastructures of Failure

Leader: Mary Wilson (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)

Considering infrastructure requires confronting failure. This seminar invites papers that engage with failures in and of modernism. How have modernist visions—architectural, ideological, aesthetic—failed the test of time? How might our scholarly efforts to determine what or who “counts” as sufficiently modernist depend on unstated logics of success and failure? How do we balance disappointment with modernists’ personal failures (fascist sympathies, racist statements, abusive actions) with our appreciation of their artistic successes? How are visionary innovations crucial to modernist self-definition interwoven with equally crucial failures of imagination? How do we respond when we encounter representations of failure in literary texts or experience failures in modernity’s material world?

Examining modernist failures, however, can also offer an opportunity to trace modernism’s infrastructures in new ways. Jack Halberstam contends that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Queer Art of Failure 2-3). In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf lays out a modernist manifesto that is shaped by and embraces failure. Woolf’s description of a modernist “season of failures and fragments” (117) anticipates Halberstam’s vision of a failure that leads to new creative forms and discoveries, and suggests that failure is at the core of modernist experimentation. How could centering failure revise our understanding of modernist infrastructures? How might modernist infrastructures be built on failure and yet not fail? How could a more thorough engagement with modernist failure enable us to reconstruct our scholarship and pedagogy to be more inclusive?

From one perspective, failure in modernism might appear as an infrastructure problem; from another, it’s a feature. Both of these points of view—and more—are welcome in a seminar that will explore how failure marks, shapes, and enlivens modernism.

Modernism’s Lawscapes

Leaders: Jack Quirk (Brown University); Raj Saikumar (New York University) Invited participant: Ravit Reichman (Brown University)

We invite presentations for a seminar on "Modernism's Lawscapes." This seminar seeks to explore the dynamic intersections between modernist literary forms, law's configuration of space, and our conception of the environment, broadly conceived. We welcome papers that investigate how the modernist novel responds to, challenges, or reimagines the spatial dimensions of legal thought and practice globally. Of particular interest are analyses that consider formal resonances, analogies, metaphors, or allegories between literary structures and legal frameworks.

Potential areas of inquiry might include:

• How modernist novels map, contest, or redefine legally demarcated spaces
• Narrative techniques that parallel or subvert legal spatial logics
• The modernist text as a lawscape where competing jurisdictional claims unfold
• Literary responses to law's attempts to order, categorize, and regulate space
• Postcolonial formal and aesthetic resistances to settler colonialism
• Formal innovations as reactions to emerging legal-spatial regimes

For instance, one might examine how Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique in Mrs. Dalloway functions as both formal analogue to and critique of law's parceling of urban space and experience; how Kafka's labyrinthine prose mirrors the bewildering architectures of legal power; or how Alexis Wright's style indexes a form of law and being outside the purview of settler colonialism.

We are particularly interested in papers that move beyond thematic readings to consider how modernist literary form itself constitutes a response to law's spatial logic. How might modernist fragmentation reflect the compartmentalization of legal domains? How do experimental narrative structures challenge law's authority to define and delineate the boundaries of lived experience? This panel aims to contribute to modernist studies by illuminating how the period's literary innovations can be understood through legal-spatial frameworks, while also engaging with law and literature studies by demonstrating how literary form engages with legal structures.

Modernism’s Racialized Infrastructures

Leaders: Dominique Townsend (University of Rochester); Sabrina Lee (Calvin University) Invited participant: Sonita Sarker (Macalester College)

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Arguably, then, the “problem of the color-line” undergirds many (if not all) modernist infrastructures. Within modernist studies, global and transnational turns have pushed the field to interrogate modernism’s entanglements with imperialism and Anglo-American-centrism, but often questions of race and racialization have been latent rather than explicit within these conversations. This seminar will attend to the relationships between race/racialization and infrastructures within and beyond questions of imperialism and canonicity. Ultimately, our seminar asks: How do race and racialization affect both the objects we study and the ways we study them?

We invite papers that consider relationships among race; racialization; infrastructure; modernist art, literature, and culture; and current theories, methods, and practices in modernist studies.In papers of 5–7 pages, participants might reflect on questions like:

• How do modernism’s infrastructures depend upon, produce, highlight, and/or obscure certain racial formations?
• How can theory and methodologies from ethnic, Black, and Indigenous studies help us read modernist texts anew?
• How do modernist aesthetics inaugurate, perpetuate, and/or resist racial formations?
• How are seemingly non-racialized modernist texts and art objects embedded in systems of racialization?
• How do infrastructures of race and racialization affect our work as literary studies scholars in a digital age?
• As modernist scholars, how might we respond to current attempts to reinforce racialized infrastructures?

Modernist Aesthetics and the Great Depression

Leader: Robert Dale Parker (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

In an age of extreme and widespread economic suffering, some writers and artists of the Great Depression feared that attention to aesthetics risked sacrificing attention to material suffering and the politics that they believed suffering demanded. “Listen! / All you beauty-makers,” Langston Hughes pleaded in the New Masses in 1931. “Give up beauty for a moment. / Look at hardness, look at pain.” How did modernist writers and artists of any kind, including but not limited to the verbal, visual, kinetic, and sonic arts, respond to the Great Depression? How has the field of modernist studies addressed the Great Depression—or dodged it? How do Depression aesthetics compare to other 1930s or modernist aesthetics? This seminar welcomes a sharp focus in one area or comparison across varying arts, geographies, or languages, across national, gendered, racialized, or class-based allegiances, patterns, and histories, and across styles and media, so long as the focus remains on modernist aesthetics and the Great Depression, rather than on the Depression era without attending to the Depression itself. Can the Depression offer a test case for discussions in modernist studies about, for example, the relation between formalism and historicism, popular and elite culture, national and international canons, indigeneity and race, spoken and unspoken categories of identity and their relation to aesthetic movements, high modernisms vs. “low” modernisms, modernist time, modernist space? In short, how can studying Depression aesthetics help us rethink modernism?

Modernist Censorship and Its Afterlives

Leaders: Andrew Koenig (Harvard University); Jeffrey Careyva (Harvard University)

This seminar takes as its starting point the emergent infrastructure of censorship in the twentieth century, and the changing landscape of censorship in the twenty-first.

Modernism is closely associated with censorship bans and the fall of obscenity laws. Papers in this seminar might look at classic examples of censorship in the modernist era (Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer), but they might also ask how modernism censored or uncensored different kinds of content (the abject, the kitsch, the revolutionary) and persons (institutionalized figures such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Lucia Joyce, Camille Claudel, and Ezra Pound). Papers might explore theoretical frameworks of censorship and content, e.g., Freud’s “dream-censorship,” and cases of self-censorship like the delayed publication of Maurice or restricted access to archives like T. S. Eliot’s.

We especially encourage work on alternative publishing infrastructures that work around censorship, e.g., independent booksellers, printers, little magazines, samizdat, and coteries. Papers might examine the infrastructures behind moments of modernist iconoclasm (such as the Armory Show or the premiere of The Rite of Spring), the suppression of “degenerate art,” and the regulation of Hollywood by the Hays Code and HUAC. Alternatively, they might explore the censorship of modernist successors, whether poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Allen Ginsberg or graphic novelists like Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman, who have been subject to a new regime of extralegal censorship mediated by school boards.

Lastly, we invite provocations on recent developments in our field and in the university. How is censorship at work today, as funding cuts and freezes impact research across the humanities and sciences? The elimination of words like “gender,” “race” and "sexuality" from the lexicons of federal agencies has a direct bearing on our own work as critics of language and expression. How might our scholarship critically engage with these new realities? What lessons might modernism have for us in our moment?

Modernist Development and Underdevelopment

Leaders: Janice Ho (University of British Columbia); Kelly Rich (Wellesley College)

This seminar invites papers examining the various geographies, histories, and aesthetics of modernist development, underdevelopment, and their imbrication. Capitalist development is invariably seen as a defining characteristic of modernism: Marshall Berman elucidates the Janus-faced experience of capitalist modernity—embodied in Goethe’s Dr. Faustus—that oscillates between the dynamic “desire of development” as well as the darker consequences of such desires in the “tragedy of development.” Fredric Jameson locates the representational invisibility of empire in modernist literature as a repressed symptom of the world-system of uneven development. Yet the implicit reduction of development to the sweeping processes of global capital occludes its more historical and politically variegated configurations, evidenced in, for instance: the infrastructure works of the New Deal; the five-year plans of the Soviet Union; the envisioning of the postcolonial developmental state; or Truman’s 1949 “Point Four” program that inaugurated a postwar era of international aid.

Furthermore, development as an idea was never restricted to just the economic sphere: originating, as Gilbert Rist has argued, from the field of natural biology and underpinned by assumptions of organic maturation, discourses of development oscillated between describing the material and the moral, between enacting changes on the exterior environment (land, agriculture, infrastructure, urban space) and interior subjectivity (education, psychology, labor, sex). Indeed, the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development, which describes development as a “comprehensive economic, social, cultural, and political process” and links it to human rights, speaks to the definitional capaciousness of the term whose longer genealogy belongs to the modernist era

How, then, did modernist cultural production engage with the histories and discourses of development and underdevelopment in its multiple domains? If Jed Esty has pointed to the “arrested Bildungsroman” as a genre that registers the presence of uneven development, and Michael Rubenstein has reflected on the “postcolonial comedy of development” that attends Irish independence, what other forms and genres emerge out of the developmental logics of the modernist era? And if underdevelopment is frequently the shadowy double of development—“the development of underdevelopment,” as Andre Gunder Frank has put it—what modes of racial, spatial, gendered, or class-based underdevelopment are explored by modernist works? We welcome broader theoretical papers reflecting on the intersections of modernism and development/underdevelopment in different domains, as well as readings of more specific histories, narratives, and representations of modernist development/underdevelopment and its legacies.

Modernist Reputation Building: Infrastructures of Promotion, Self-Promotion, and Publicity

Leader: Dipanjan Maitra (Louisiana Tech University)

Scholars of modernism have long complicated Andreas Huyssen’s (1986) claim that modernists viewed mass culture with an “an anxiety of contamination” and that “[m]odernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.” In fact, as Lawrence Rainey (1998) and others have put it, the rise of institutions like the tabloid and the music hall ushered in “new strategies of reputation building– involving theatricality, spectacle, publicity, and novel modes of cultural marketing and media manipulation.” Similarly, Aaron Jaffe (2005) has shown that modernist reputations were built often with the help of “imprimaturs” and authorial endorsement (T.S. Eliot’s introductions for emerging writers for instance) or by forging literary networks with the help of anthologies. Mark S. Morrisson (2000) thus mentions the increased sophistication of commodity advertising techniques (e.g. of national brand-name products) with “new print technologies and graphic capabilities” in mass periodicals that inaugurated a shift from subscription models to advertisement techniques to garner profit. One can also engage fruitfully with individual strategies at self-promotion on the part of modernists: lecture tours or interviews. In the same vein, the popularity of the literary agents like James Pinker, who at one point represented the interests of H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and others to potential publishers can also be seen as useful intermediaries (to quote Pascale Casanova) to promote, regulate, and determine the reception of modernist authors. In other words, far from effacing themselves to the background paring their fingernails, we often see the modernist artist sullying their hands in active self-promotion, hiring professionals, and closely working with publishers and influential critics to market their wares in the literary marketplace. This seminar seeks brief 5–7-page position papers that address and unravel infrastructures and institutions that furthered careers of modernists and shaped their strategies of reputation building, self-promotion, and publicity.

Neither Infrastructure nor Superstructure: Gramsci, Modernism, and the War of Position

Leaders: Ken Hirschkop (University of Waterloo); Scott McCracken (Queen Mary, University of London)

Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist who took culture seriously, making it an integral part of his critique of capitalist modernity. But how far do Gramsci’s analytic categories help us to understand what is modern about modern culture?

Gramsci’s distinctive grasp of the modern state and modern civil society requires us to study every aspect of contemporary culture – including its popular, residual, ‘folkloric’ elements, religion, pedagogy, periodicals, and the popular press – in order to understand how multiple ‘conceptions of the world’ intersect in any given political conjuncture. Eschewing a Leninist ‘frontal assault’ on the state, he argues for a war of position fought among and within these forms, in the trenches of social and cultural institutions. His call for a ‘national-popular’ literature, his polemic with Futurism, his concepts of ‘common sense’, economism and voluntarism, and his critique of the popular Italian literature of his time (‘Father Bresciani’s progeny’) all point to a unique interpretative framework, which refuses to classify cultural forms according to class categories or to artificial divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’, avant-garde and kitsch, popular and literary, modernism and mass culture.

In this seminar, we ask how Gramsci’s concepts and methodology can help us to rethink early twentieth-century culture from the perspective of a dynamic present. We invite position papers of 5-7 pages that use either specific Gramscian concepts––e.g. the national-popular, the operatic style, folklore, the integral state, organic and traditional intellectuals, economism versus voluntarism, the Modern Prince––or a broader Gramscian framework to offer new interpretations of early twentieth-century cultural forms––such as writing, film, dance, the visual arts, music, and journalism. We are also interested in contributions that draw attention to the differences between Gramscian analysis and other comprehensive critiques of modernity, e.g., those of Durkheim, Weber, Lukács, the Frankfurt School.

Peripheral Modernism as Worldly Infrastructure

Leaders: Pavel Andrade (Texas Tech University); Ericka Beckman (University of Pennsylvania)

Invited participants: Emilio Sauri (University of Massachusetts, Boston); Tavid Mulder (Emerson College)

What would it mean to think peripheral modernism infrastructurally? How do peripheral artworks distribute the infrastructural arrangements of the world system? What kinds of roadways, canals, and bridges does peripheral literature build? How does peripheral aesthetics operate the industrial and natural landscapes of the world economy? This seminar invites papers that delve into the worldly infrastructures of peripheral literatures, that is, how peripheral literatures register, model, and think the historical and material configurations of the world system. From environmental technology to environmental disaster, this seminar will consider how peripheral modernism engages with the ecologies of capitalist modernity. We welcome papers that explore the worldly orientations of peripheral literatures and that reimagine modernist praxis across the Global South as world-building activity. This seminar aims to bring into focus the contribution of peripheral aesthetics to a world history of infrastructure, in particular, we aim to highlight the infrastructural dimensions of peripheral literary works, their registration, both at the level of content and form, of the communication systems, public services, and economic networks that have shaped capitalist modernity and its industrial and environmental cycles. We invite submissions that explore these topics from different peripheral positions and time periods.

Following the MSA seminar model, participants will pre-circulate short papers (these could be position papers, critical readings of single works, theoretical provocations, or portions of a larger project) that engage with the seminar’s topics. Ahead of the seminar, the organizers will devise a set of guiding questions that will serve as a starting point for our conversation. After a quick round of interventions where participants will introduce their papers and main arguments, we will devote the remainder of the session to collective dialogue and open conversation.

Public-Facing Modernism

Leader: Charles Andrews (Whitworth University)

Invited participant: Patrick R. Query (United States Military Academy, West Point)

Modernist studies has something special to offer beyond our guild during this current time of division, turmoil, hostility, and crisis. The global crises of the previous century—authoritarianism, economic calamity, and violence—were faced with astonishing artistic and political creativity by many of the people we study. How might modernist scholars bring this creativity and the resources of our field to broader publics through our writing, teaching, and speaking? What kinds of presses, magazines, journals, and online or in-person venues exist for doing meaningful public-facing scholarship? How might we invite and encourage audiences who can benefit from our field? How might our work be more activist? In this seminar we will explore ways to do public-facing scholarship, welcoming experienced public scholars and anyone interested in developing this kind of work.

Reimagining the Feminist Modernist Publishing Infrastructure: Values and Ethics

Leaders: Erica Delsandro (Bucknell University); Laurel Harris (Rider University); Catherine Hollis (University of California, Berkeley)

Feminist infrastructure–intellectual, professional, political, practical–does exist within modernist studies. But as feminist scholars know, this infrastructure is not supported or maintained by the dominant academic culture and, thus, is constantly in a state of disrepair, if not outright collapse, requiring additional labor from marginalized and under-represented scholars. Like deteriorating roads, bridges, and power lines, academic infrastructure, too, necessitates regular maintenance, even demolition and rebuilding.

The monograph has long been the gold standard for academic success, especially for scholars on the tenure track. But the tenure-track model as the sole metric for defining academic success is outdated and inadequate. Moreover, with the adjunctification of the professoriate and increasing competition for jobs, even traditional journal publishing processes should be reassessed for both their practical and ethical value–for authors, for editors, and for the field broadly.

This seminar will examine the feminist modernist publishing infrastructure: How and where do feminist modernist scholars publish? What are the affordances and drawbacks of both academic publishing and new venues–podcasts, Substacks, cultural magazines–for feminist modernist scholars? How and where are feminist scholars mentored, supported, and celebrated? What obstacles do feminist modernist scholars encounter in the process of publication? How can a feminist ethics of care transform the publishing process to be more equitable, transparent, and generative?

Building upon the Feminist Migrations in Publishing seminar (MSA 2024), we will continue expanding the seminar format: rather than sharing individual work, this seminar will center the collaborative production of a Feminist Publishing Manifesto to be disseminated broadly and presented to the boards of MSA and CELJ. Seminar participants will contribute to the conversation before meeting in Boston through a shared Google document in service of a working session during the conference.

Relational Uncertainty

Leaders: Kristin Grogan (Rutgers University, New Brunswick); Brian Glavey (University of South Carolina)

This seminar explores the productive nature of relational uncertainty—that is, we want to explore social relations in a way that highlights and sits with their uncertainties and ambiguities, rather than tries to resolve them. Relational modes of theorizing are often characterized by an optimism about the legibility and benevolence of the relation as a unit of sociality. But anyone who has ever been related to someone else knows that relationality is a mess. We are interested in Lauren Berlant’s account of the irreducible “inconvenience” of coexistence, and the usefulness of recognizing an “ambivalent relationality that induces elbow room, breathing space, and patience with the contradictory demand we make of our objects–to be known but not too much, to know without presumptions.” Uncertainty in social relations is ubiquitous, often frustrating–or inconvenient–but also productive and ethically necessary. Being known but not too much also releases the individual from the demand of total self-knowledge. Writing about Sylvia Plath and the problems of biography, Jacqueline Rose poses this as a question of individual rights: “To what forms of uncertainty,” she writes, “do you have the right?” If we begin from the point of the right to uncertainty, what theory of social life emerges? Can attending to uncertainty help us navigate away between negativity and utopianism–or between alienation and a fantasy of the commons of seamless social relation? What do social relations in the Marxist sense have to do with problems of uncertainty in coexistence? And what is the role of aesthetics and the work of art in uncertain social relations–as mediation, useful irritant, shared object, as a model of forms of complicated attachment?

Topics to be addressed might include:

• Object relations theory
• Relatability and unrelatability
• Affect and attachment theory
• Solidarity, organizing, mutual aid, and collective worldmaking
• Aesthetic theory and relationality
• Modernism and social alienation
• Utopianism/heterotopianism

Religion and Empire in Transnational Modernisms

Leaders: Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London); Apala Das (Bilkent University)

There have been several important contributions to the topic of modernism and religion in the past decade. However, as noted by contributors to MSA 2024’s seminar on “Religion and the Global Turn” these studies have been comparatively slow to incorporate and adopt global religious lexicons and transnational frameworks. At the same time, although several scholars have fundamentally reconfigured modernism’s relation to empire over the past few decades, they have often done so without challenging perceptions of its “secular” character. This seminar aims to address these gaps in modernist scholarship by opening up new conversations at the intersection of religion, empire, and transnational modernisms.

We invite transnational approaches to modernism’s relationship with religion and spirituality. We would aim to show how religion(s) feed into and cut across literary “worldmaking” (Adom Getachew) in ways responsive and resistant to imperial and national imaginaries in this period. Alongside the categories of religion, spirituality, and secularity, we emphasize “empire” because, following scholars such as Laura Doyle and Neil Lazarus, we see the “constitution and reconstitution of world-structures,” especially those of empire (and its combined and uneven late capitalist neoliberal neo-imperial legacies) as enabling and conditioning the cultural exchanges, hierarchies, and inequalities that characterize global modernism.

We approach modernism’s multicentricity both conceptually and methodologically, using not only a cross-cultural framework but also an interdisciplinary one. This approach allows us to invite critical insights about religion and empire from other fields such as postcolonial studies, critical secular studies, and religious studies to the study of modernist texts. In this seminar, we also aim to take account of new directions in religious studies, especially those that link the development of comparative religious studies as an academic discipline with the power dynamics and histories of empire.

Surveillance modernity, surveillance modernisms

Leader: Stephanie Brown (University of Arizona)

This seminar proposes to consider surveillance, broadly conceived, as a practice of modernity. In keeping with the theme of the conference, it encourages considerations of surveillance infrastructures as constitutive of, and responses to, modernity. It asks whether our definitions of modernity and modernism might reveal them to be coeval with surveillance as an increasingly institutional, corporate, transnational, and state-based mode of control.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the expansion of surveillance-based state power at the level of nations and empires (including emergent US imperial ambitions in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific). However, the seminar will not limit its consideration of the entanglement of modernity and surveillance to these decades, and may include work that takes up surveillance modernity outside a strictly delineated historical modernism. Similarly, work that considers non-state infrastructures (of e.g. the factory, the ship, the corporation, the university) are welcome. The seminar will query how different media forms, working at scales that vary from the compactness of the passport, the poem, and the case file up to the expansiveness of the census, the sociological study, the epic, and the ordinance survey, registered emerging surveillance culture. It will ask, broadly, how surveillance practices and the institutions from which they emerged shaped modernist aesthetic practice? Similarly, it encourages participants consider the affordances of modernism to reveal the dynamics, desires, impulses, and demands that underlay various surveillance infrastructures as they evolved.

Unruly Geographies: Modernist Women’s Transnational Writing

Leaders: Eret Talviste (University of Tartu); Ruth Alison Clemens (Leiden University)

In her introduction to Feminism as World Literature (2022), Robin Truth Goodman writes that “the field of World Literature seems to skirt away from feminism” (1), noting how the genealogical trajectory of the field is as male as it is Eurocentric. Similarly, as feminist scholars note (Friedman 2011, 2015; Berman 2018; Fernald 2013; Laity 2018), debates in transnational and global modernist studies continue to draw their theories by focusing on models and infrastructures of mobility centred around male writers, institutions, and networks.se topics from different peripheral positions and time periods.

This seminar seeks to complicate the usual geographical divisions, infrastructures, and networks by emphasising ‘weak’ (Saint-Amour 2018) and affective connections between women writers across nations, cultures, times and languages. Following recent interventions in global, transnational, and planetary modernist studies (Mao and Walkowitz 2008; James and Seshagiri 2014) and translational epistemologies (Schögler 2022; Bennett 2024), the seminar has two wider purposes. First, to create dialogues between minor, forgotten, or little-known modernist women across the globe. Second, to build a network of scholars from different backgrounds to generate literary and epistemic translations.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• transnational feminisms; decolonial and liberation movements
• national or international (geo)politics; women and war; women and fascism
• reproductive politics and justice
• women and transnational infrastructures (investment; citizenship; patronage; networks; marriage etc.)
• women writers whose works or lives complicate regional borders e.g of Europe
• belonging and non-belonging; home and homelessness
• indigeneity, empire, and settler colonialism
• translational knowledge: moving knowledges from one language, culture and time to another
• translingual tensions: vernaculars and modernism; regional and global avant-gardes
• teaching translated and world literature today

‘Women’ includes cis, trans, non-binary women, and otherwise significantly female-identified lives. As this seminar aims to build scholarly infrastructure, we encourage papers that introduce previously untranslated writers into English. Non-traditional papers are also welcome (creative-critical; collaborative; transmedial).

Utopian Infrastructures

Leader: Kristin Bluemel (Monmouth University)

Invited participants: Maria Farland (Fordham University); Marty Cain (Cornell University)

What can the infrastructures of modern utopias teach us about those idealizing arts, literatures, and lived experiments that brought form to the modernists’ dreams of the good place (“eutopia”), the bad place (“dystopia”), or to that best place of all, no place (“utopia”)? The aim of this seminar is to identify and analyze diverse instances and outcomes of utopian thinking in modern and modernist constructions of real or fantastic places that aspired to a utopian (dystopian) infrastructural purpose and/or design. Participants in this seminar will contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation analyzing the most powerful ideals, myths, and delusions of modern infrastructure: the perfect electric system, the perfect postal system, the perfect medical system, the perfect education system, the perfect religion, the perfect army, the perfect navy, the perfect nation. The utopias inviting our infrastructural argument may range from communities like Roosevelt, New Jersey, to nations like the Soviet Union; from novels like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland to Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night; from paintings like Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection, Cookham to Le Corbusier’s architectural installation, Esprit Nouveau Pavilion; from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management; the media, the materials, the motivations of utopian infrastructures are everywhere (and nowhere). Pursuing interdisciplinary, comparative analysis along utopian lines, we will follow wherever utopian infrastructures lead. To nature? To purity? To prosperity? To pleasure? To perdition? Sharing and discussing our utopian research in 5-7-page position papers, we can hope to discover new ways of approaching and knowing modernism and modernity.

Writing in Conversation: Infrastructures of Modernist Community

Leaders: Matthew Kilbane (University of Notre Dame); Christopher Seiji Berardino (University of California, Riverside)

Workshops, clubs, groups, guilds, salons, retreats, forums, meetings—much of the work of literary modernism transpired in community, around specific tables in specific rooms. This seminar explores the forms of community-based organization that sustained and nurtured literary production in the first half of the twentieth century. We ask: what might it mean to cast these organizations as provisional infrastructures? We’re excited to commune over case studies of a wide range of literary assemblies, from recognized groups like Bloomsbury, Los Contemporáneos, the Southside Writer’s Workshop, John Reed Clubs, and the Harlem Writers’ Guild, to any number of less studied initiatives: publishing endeavors in the Japanese-American incarceration camps, for instance, or midcentury poetry workshops at public libraries across the United States. Together, we'll imagine how to draw from this diverse archive a new prehistory of the postwar Program Era, and we'll ask whether it’s possible to trace a modernist genealogy of the community-based and movement-affiliated writing workshops of the 1960s and 1970s.

We are also keen to explore what new critical strategies are required for the study of community-based writing. Though it has long been the province of craft manuals, textbooks, author memoirs, and literary journalism, the practice of writing itself—and particularly those practices that do not issue in published books or magazines—has persistently eluded literary scholarship. The reason for this oversight is not hard to fathom. Our capacities for knowledge production rely on the existence of accessible texts, the products of writing. Scholars are less well-equipped to study historically specific and collaborative writing processes, largely because the habits, practices, and infrastructures responsible for fostering said writing tend to resist representation in the archive. What might the study of community writing contribute to modernist studies? How might this make room for a more collective understanding of Modernism? Let us gather then, you and I, to explore what was mutually made by the many!