The Modernist Studies Association is pleased to offer the following workshops during the Loughborough 2026 conference. This year, rather than signing up for these workshops as part of general registration, you will need to do so through our additional programming form.
Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel
Leaders: Prof. Jamie Callison (University of Agder), Dr. Elizabeth Anderson (University of Aberdeen), Prof. Mimi Winick (Virginia Commonwealth University), Dr. Graham Jensen (Digital Research Alliance of Canada), Prof. Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London)
Exploration of religion speaks to modernist fascination with the global. Inspired by the foundational scholarship of Susan Stanford Friedman and Leon Surette, modernism and religion has emerged as a prominent subfield at recent MSA conferences. While agons with Judaism, Christianity, and nondenominational spirituality in European and American contexts have shaped much of this work to date, the global turn represents an opportunity to integrate work on modernism with new methods from religious studies, such J. Barton Scott's “connective” approach. This approach enables scholars to attend to the significant role of comparative religion in modernist aesthetics without using a comparative method that risks replicating modernist logics rather than illuminating modernist projects in new ways.
To facilitate this shift, the Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel (MaRGAN) project is producing a searchable database that records engagements with religion in approximately 500 modernist novels, classifying and describing relevant elements of religion (ritual, gods and spirts, community etc), the religious traditions with which they engage, and the geographical areas from which they emerge accompanied by several visualisations. The workshop invites scholars of modernism and religion, the global modernist novel, digital humanists, and individual authors whose work interacts with religious themes to explore in a structured way a prototype of the MaRGAN database, bringing familiar elements of well-known novels into conversation with lesser-known texts from across the globe. Through a range of planned activities, participants leave the workshop with an expanded understanding of how religion and the global interact in the context of modernism, a framework for working with and across diverse and underrepresented texts, and experience of a new digital tool and dataset that can be integrated into future teaching and research.
Ghost in the Medium: Teaching and Researching Text and Image
Leaders: Prof. Emily Hyde (Rowan University), Ms. Jo Klevdal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Photography has long had ghostly associations. Roland Barthes insists that every photograph hails “the return of the dead” while Susan Sontag describes the photo as a memento mori which testifies to “time’s relentless melt.” But these ghostly images rarely circulate independently. They are transformed into engravings or lithographs; their tonalities translated into dots for halftone printing or digitized into pixels; they are surrounded by text and bound into the pages of a book or magazine. If, through the process of dissemination, photographs become “apparitions of themselves,”as Geoffrey Batchen puts it, then how do we understand their ghostliness? This workshop addresses the weirdness inherent in the shifting, composite nature of photographic media and considers the following questions: How can we engage with hybrid media forms that occlude their material printing processes? How does the way an image is made inform our approach to it as scholars, teachers, and makers? How can we read for both word and image in the illustrated text without relying on hierarchies of value? And finally, how can we teach the ghost in the medium using digital techniques?
This workshop will offer participants five “close-looking” stations. Each station will include one physical object ranging from an illustrated novel, mid-century magazine, or artist book by writers and photographers Amos Tutuola, Walker Evans, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank O’Hara, and Georges Rodenbach. Each object thematizes the ghostly both in content and material printing processes. In small groups, participants will spend 10 minutes at 2-3 stations, carefully examining the objects–with no additional information. We will then distribute historical information relevant to authorship, publication, and dissemination. Participants will conclude with a large-group discussion of the difficulty for both teaching and research of balancing meaning and medium, materiality and history, authorial intention and commercial demand.
Film Studies Workshop
Leaders: Prof. John Hoffmann (Chapman University)
Building on the immensely successful workshops held at the three preceding MSA conferences, this event will allow members of the Film Studies Special Interest Group to continue the conversations begun last year while deepening connections within the SIG. For the workshop, presenters pre-circulate current work that will then be discussed in breakout sessions. This format allows for a kind of sustained intellectual engagement that is uncommon for conference settings; and participants at the earlier workshops have said repeatedly how much they enjoy the opportunity for extended, focused discussions of pre-circulated papers. Furthermore, the workshop should appeal to a demographic that the MSA keenly needs to support: junior scholars and graduate students. Since many dissertations on twentieth-century literature and culture now include a chapter on film, the workshop gives these scholars a chance to receive feedback while bringing them into the MSA fold. Finally, the workshop is an excellent way to attract film scholars who do not usually attend the MSA because current work can be solicited in advance, thus obviating the need to compose new papers for a panel or roundtable. Pre-registration will be required.
Give What You Can, Take What You Need: Creating Modernist Mutual Aid *VIRTUAL SEMINAR*
Leaders: Dr. Nissa Ren Cannon (Stanford University), Dr. Catherine Hollis (Independent Scholar)
The story of modernist art is a story of collaboration. There might be no Ulysses without Sylvia Beach; no Waste Land without Ezra Pound or Vivien Eliot; no Contact Press without Bryher. As universities turn ever more towards austerity—stripping scholars of travel funding, library access, and academic freedoms—the future of modernist scholarship, too, relies on collaboration through community activism.
Building on previous conversations amongst the Caucus for Contingent and Independent Scholars and other members of the MSA, this workshop will think through how we can create networks of solidarity amongst scholars—mutual aid for modernists, if you will. Mutual aid – defined by Dean Spade as the “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs” (Mutual Aid (2020), 7) – has proven to be an effective response to environmental disasters. Given the multiple intersecting crises imperiling the humanities in general and modernist studies in particular, this workshop will explore how mutual aid might offer a source of community care within academia.
This is a hands-on opportunity to build something together! Bring your ideas, your experiences, your hopes, your needs, and your technical skills. Come prepared to think through resources that might be shared—database access? On the ground archival work? Conference hotel rooms? And ways we might share them—a dedicated website? A listserv? Social media?
This workshop is organized under the auspices of CCIS, but open to all!
Weird Waste: A Hands-On Craft Workshop in Modernist (Re)Making
Leaders: Prof. Diana Proenza (Unviersity of Maryland, College Park), Dr. Jade French (Loughborough University), Dr. Molly Volanth Hall (Rhode Island School of Design)
Inspired by modernist makers and waste-pickers like Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Kurt Schwitters, and Virginia Woolf, this Modernism and Environment SIG-sponsored workshop brings together attendees to participate in a collective making experiment in modernist material praxis, collaboratively reworking found objects and materials into new, strange forms to reflect on the role of sustainability in modernist scholarship and pedagogy. We invite participants to scour their surroundings before or during the conference to collect trash, keep train tickets, repurpose notes, gather odds and ends, and bring everyday objects to the session to use as art materials.
Finding a shared impulse towards remediation, reuse, and recycling in the literary and artistic avant-garde of modernism, the session will invite participants to explore the reflective and embodied practices of modernism’s multimedia forms through an act of cultural re-making, recovering an ethic of sustainability at the heart of modernist aesthetics and histories, though not always expressed in directly environmental terms. We will connect modernist found objects, collage, assemblages and readymades with contemporary practices and pedagogies also anchored in the uncanny aesthetics of waste and reuse, reflecting on how contemporary artists like Betye Saar, Nari Ward, and Doris Salcedo reanimate found objects with political intent to interrogate systemic cycles of violence. Taking a cue from Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer’s 1978 essay, ‘WASTE NOT WANT NOT’ (1978), we will gather “the loose, drifting material of life” and reformulate it. Like Loy “rooting erotic garbage” or Ofelia Rodríguez’s magic boxes, our workshop also emphasizes the ways modernist waste-picking and (re)making recovered the eccentric, magical, and weird art, environments, and communities often discarded to the margins of canonical modernism.
Following the hands-on portion of the workshop (we have secured funding for materials which will be provided for participants), the co-facilitators will lead a discussion reflecting on how the workshop centers principles of sustainability, creativity, collaboration, and reuse within, as a legacy of, and beyond modernist making. In particular, we will encourage participants to think about how the principles of slowness, fluidity, and plurality inherent to the models of modernist handiwork and craft (see: Elkins, 2022) and media production (small presses, little magazines, pamphlets, etc.) offer reuse and recycling as a weird intervention that lets us encounter the everyday in new ways.
E-Poetry Workshop
Leader: Dr. Leonardo Flores
In this 2-hour workshop, participants will learn how to adapt an e-poem to use its form to create new works, and how to use AI to generate code to create new poetic forms that take advantage of the affordances of digital media. E-poetry is an experimental practice that extends Modernist poetics into digital media by creating new poetic forms that incorporate text generation, interactivity, animation, multimodality, networked data, and other aspects of digital culture.
In the first part of the workshop will use published open-access works, such as “Taroko Gorge” by Nick Montfort (https://nickm.com/poems/taroko_gorge/), and learn how to modify the code to create new poems based on the original’s e-poetic form.
In the second part, we will also learn how to prompt an AI system to generate valid HTML code, along with a code editor, to create a unique work of e-poetry. These practices are examples of cyborg writing because we integrate human and artificial intelligence to produce literal machines made of words. This workshop will offer participants a unique opportunity to learn basic code literacy and will offer tools and techniques that lower the technical bar to produce original works of digital literature. No experience in programming is needed to participate in this workshop.
This workshop will build upon my Cyborg Digital Writing Primer: https://leonardoflores.net/blog/resources/a-cyborg-digital-writing-primer/
What’s Next: Life and Work After Submission
Leaders: Jenny Kenyon (University of Bristol), Lily Martin (Keele University), John D. Attridge (Regent College London), Enaiê Mairê Azambuja (Independent Researcher; incoming Visiting Research Fellow, University of Tampere), James Dowthwaite (University of Mainz), Paul Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania), Aran Ward Sell (University of Notre Dame)
Aimed at graduate students and early career researchers, but open to all, this session will feature speakers from a range of career stages and backgrounds. We will cover topics ranging from publishing your research (including a first monograph), to navigating job interviews, applying for postdoctoral awards, and connecting with networks for doctoral and postdoctoral scholars. The session will also address sustaining your research outside of institutional structures, managing and participating in public engagement projects, and careers beyond and adjacent to academia. Chaired by the BAMS and MSA postgraduate reps, the session will begin with short introductory talks from each of our speakers, followed by an extended Q&A. Please feel free to ask any questions you have relating to life and work after submission.