Digital programming has concluded for 2024. Review past meetings below, and stay tuned for upcoming announcements in spring 2025.

TEACHING MODERNISMS

A series of free online events co-organised by seven international associations of modernists:

  • Australasian Modernist Studies Network
  • British Association for Modernist Studies
  • Modernism, Aestheticism and Decadence Studies
  • Modernist Studies Association
  • Modernist Studies in Asia
  • Société d'études modernistes
  • Virginia Woolf Society Turkey

25 July – 5 August 2024

Zoom link (for all sessions)

Free registration (advised)

PROGRAM

(please remember to check/convert times)

Thursday 25 July: 1-3pm UK/2-4pm CEST/8-10am EST/8-10pm HK/10pm-12am Sydney

Teaching Translations

Participants: Alex Brostoff (Kenyon), Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (UPenn), Gayle Rogers (Pittsburg)

Chair: Christos Hadjiyiannis (Regensburg)

Modernist literature was written in many different languages. Teachers of modernism teach translated works and are translators themselves – as were many modernist writers. What are the challenges of teaching translated works and what the pedagogical opportunities afforded? In this session, teachers of modernism, translation scholars, and translators discuss how they themselves have taught translations, how they approach the crossing of languages, locations, and meanings, and what more (or less) we have to do as teachers.

Alex Brostoff is an interdisciplinary scholar, translator, and Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. Their work emerges from the intersections of literary nonfiction, critical theory, and trans/queer cultural production in modern and contemporary hemispheric American studies. Their first book, Feral Renewals, reframes autotheory as a subset of a transnational turn toward marginalized modes of theorizing relationality. They are the co-editor of Autotheories (The MIT Press, forthcoming 2025), special issues of ASAP/Journal on autotheory (2021) and College Literature on trans literatures (forthcoming 2025), and co-translator of Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023) and Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024). Their scholarship, translations, and public writing have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Representations, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, Assay, and Hyperallergic, as well as at the MoMA and elsewhere.

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a translator and literary theorist who writes on translation, gender and nationalism, and technologies of racialization in the geographies of Armenia, Turkey, and their diasporas. She has called these places, and likewise Italy and her native New York, home. Her first translation monograph, Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled (AWST/TAP 2023), won the English PEN Translates award in 2023; other translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Wasafiri (forthcoming), and by Skira Editore. Her scholarly work has appeared in ASAP/Journal (2021), Social Text (2023), Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies (2023), among others. Deanna is currently based out of Istanbul as she completes her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gayle Rogers is Andrew W. Mellon Professor and Chair of English at the University of Pittsburg. As well as translation theory, he works on the history of ideas, global modernisms, comparative literature, critical history, and the intersections of literature, economics, and risk theory. His recent works include Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia University Press, 2021) and The New Modernist Studies Reader: An Anthology of Essential Criticism, ed. with Sean Latham (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). His previous books include Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of American and Spanish Literatures (Columbia UP, 2016), and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford UP, 2012). He is a founding member of the international consortium El ensayo literario. He is also, with Joshua L. Miller, editor of the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster, Translation and/as Disconnection.

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Friday 26 July: 2-4pm UK/3-5pm CEST/9-11am EST/9-11pm HK/11pm-1am Sydney

Queer Futures and State Violence

Facilitator: Angela Acosta (Davidson)

The discussion will center around the following questions:

  • With what texts and approaches do we teach LGBTQIA+ modernist writers who worked towards queer liberation and the potential for queer futures amidst state violence (the many wars, dictatorships, and other clashes with the state and its institutions that occurred in the regions and time periods modernist scholars study)?
  • How can we orient our pedagogical practices when studying queer survival amidst state violence?
  • How can we fight past and ongoing state violence in the classroom, and how do we do so with care and compassion for the individuals we study, our students, and ourselves?

Angela Acosta is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College and incoming Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her research works towards recovering the legacies of twentieth-century Spanish queer and female modernist writers. She has published on female life-writing, poetry, and literary personas in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies. She is author of a forthcoming chapter on homages to “las Sinsombrero” for New Approaches to Women’s Cultural Activity in Early 20th Century Iberia: Translation, Collaboration, Mediation. She is co-editor with Rebecca Haidt for a forthcoming Special Issue of Feminist Modernist Studies on Spanish Sapphic Modernity (summer 2024).

Friday 26 July: 4.30-6.30pm UK/5.30-7.30pm CEST/11.30am-1.30pm EST/1.30-3.30am Sydney/11.30pm-1.30am HK

Climate Crisis and Modernist Praxis

Facilitators: Anne Raine (Ottawa), Sookyoung Lee (St. Lawrence), William Kupinse (Puget Sound), Stephen Ross (Victoria), Molly Volanth Hall (Rhode Island School of Design)

Please join us for the first session of an online screening and discussion series on Climate Crisis and Modernist Praxis, hosted by MSA’s Modernism & Environment Special Interest Group, and (first session only) part of this summer’s series of free online digital events. We will meet three times between July and September. In each meeting, we will screen sessions on climate migration and displacement from this past year's UN Climate Summit (COP28) and then discuss how we might bring current climate policy and science into our modernist studies classrooms, scholarship, and other professional activities. Our goal is to think purposefully as a community about what modernist studies can contribute to public debates about climate change, climate migration, and environmental justice.

  • Session #1: Friday, July 26, 11:30 am ET is on “Human Rights Implications of Climate Migration and Forced Displacement”
  • Session #2: Friday, Aug. 23, 11 am ET is on “Refugee Women, Climate Action and the Green Economy”
  • Session #3: Friday, Sept. 27, 11 am ET is on “Displaced People Taking Action on Loss and Damages”

If you are not a member of either the M&E or MSA listservs already, please email Anne Raine (araine@ottowa.ca) or Molly Volanth Hall (mhall04@risd.edu) to be added.

We will screen the COP recordings during the sessions, so there is no need to view them in advance. However, we have provided YouTube links on the M&E website for your reference.

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Monday 29 July: 11am-1pm UK/12-2pm CEST/6-8am EST/8-10pm Sydney/6-8pm HK

Teaching Two Things at Once

Participants: Maurizio Ascari (Università di Bologna), Jung-Hsin Hsieh (KCL), Michael McCluskey (Northeastern), Luke Seaber (UCL)

One of the typical - or stereotypical - features of Modernism is its difficulty and its allusiveness. To teach it is to teach references to a vast web of other texts and contexts; it is to teach multiple voices speaking multiple languages. No-one, whether teaching or being taught, can find all of these things equally transparent and before/alongside studying/teaching the text one has to study/teach an array of other material.

One strand of this session will explore how this may work, both theoretically and practically, in a range of contexts. What does it mean to have to teach hypotexts next to texts; lines in other languages; disparate historical and social allusions? And how does this differ according to where and whom one is teaching?

The other strand will examine doing things with Modernism when teaching it. What happens when one's primary focus is not to teach a Modernist text but to use it to teach certain forms of analysis? What happens when innovative Modernist and Surrealist practices of writing are used pedagogically to teach students (about) their own practices of writing?

Brief presentations from people with experiences of pedagogy in a range of contexts will be followed by an open discussion.

Monday 29 July: 3-5pm UK/4-6pm CEST/10am-12pm EST/12-2am Sydney/10pm-12am HK

Material Modernisms: A Teaching Workshop

Facilitators: Marsha Bryant (Florida), Sunny Stalter-Pace (Auburn)

Modernism has always hinged on materiality. So much depended on that red wheelbarrow in William Carlos Williams’s poem, on the household boxes in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, on the old tin can in Wallace Stevens’s poetic trash heap. Modernists hoarded objects and scraps, bringing material dimensions to their aesthetics, their writing, their artworks. The Museum of Modern Art brought Tupperware products into their galleries to extol Good Design. Material plastics came to signify modernity itself: in the plastic emotions of Le Corbusier’s new architecture, in Salvador Dali’s super-plastic color photographs. Just as materiality inspired modernists to “make it new” across a wide range of media, materiality can renew our pedagogies across a wide range of academic disciplines and teaching modalities (including Architecture and Art studios, Literature surveys, Composition and Creative Writing workshops, and courses on Anthropology, Sociology, and Sustainability). Through material modernisms teachers can create engaging, hands-on assignments for brainstorming, critical making, prewriting, writing, and more. This Workshop has two parts: (1) Repurposing and Creative Reuse, (2) Assemblage, Bricolage, Collage. Pre-workshop preparation: brief readings, an everyday object from your home, a household object that you plan to discard.

Marsha Bryant, Professor & Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the U. of Florida (USA), has published essays about teaching in the journals Humanities, Plath Profiles, Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and Pedagogy (as well as in the books The Classics in Modernist Translation and Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose). Professor Bryant also co-edited the textbook Impact of Materials on Society (2021). She has co-led teaching workshops for the University of Florida, the Harn Museum of Art, and the Materials Research Society. Bryant writes about modernist studies, poetry and visual culture, women’s writing, pedagogy, and craft beer.

Sunny Stalter-Pace is Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University. She is the author of two monographs, Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance (Northwestern UP, 2020) and Underground Movements: Modernist Culture on the New York City Subway (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). She currently serves as the Chair for Interdisciplinary Approaches on the Modernist Studies Association board. She has published essays on performance and popular culture in Modernism/modernity print+, Theatre Journal, and Feminist Modernist Studies, among others.

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Tuesday 30 July: 9-11am UK/10am-12pm CEST/4-6am EST/6-8pm Sydney/4-6pm HK

Teaching Different Media: Literature, Film, Photography, Performance

Participants: Charlotte Estrade (Université Paris Nanterre, France), Adrienne Janus (University of Tours, France). Melissa Sarikaya (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen/Nürnberg, Germany), Naomi Toth (Université Paris Nanterre, France)

This session will feature:

  • Naomi Toth (Université Paris Nanterre, France) on Zukofsky and film
  • Adrienne Janus (University of Tours, France) on modernist theatre and film
  • Melissa Sarikaya (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen/Nürnberg, Germany) on poetry and ekphrasis
  • Charlotte Estrade (Université Paris Nanterre, France) on modernist poetry (Eliot and Pound) and painting + sculpture
  • [TBC: Nell Wasserstrom on teaching modernist poetry from an intermedial perspective + students' intermedial final projects (film, collage, a blending of poetry and visual art, etc.)]

Topics of discussion will include the following:

  • What type of corpus do you teach? Do you use any specific methodology or pedagogic strategies?
  • What is at stake in teaching modernism in its different forms (painting, sculpture, music, performance, etc.)?
  • What difficulties or specificities does intermediality entail?
  • How does one articulate teaching literature and other forms of modernist practices?
  • What is the reception of those media by different types of students or audiences?
  • How can one articulate our research and this teaching experience ? How do they mutually enrich one another?

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Wednesday 31 July: 8-10pm EST [Tuesday 30 July]/1-3am UK/2-4am CEST/10am-12pm Sydney/8-10am HK

Teaching the Archive: Periodicals, Film, Literary Editing

Participants: Katherine Fusco (Nevada, Reno), Sarah Gleeson-White (Sydney), Alice Grundy, Stefan Solomon (Macquarie)

Chair: John Attridge (UNSW)

This panel will explore teaching from and with the “archive” – defining that term broadly to refer to texts and documents whose retrieval depends on a deliberate act of recuperation. Archives of one kind or another are central to our research, but it can be difficult to translate the recondite, neglected or ephemeral documents we use to tell new stories about modernism into the classroom. The panel will showcase several concrete instances of this kind of teaching, focusing on periodicals, literary editing and agitprop short films, respectively. Panellists will detail their theoretical and practical approaches to archival materials as teaching texts, reflect on the challenges that attend introducing students to recherché documents and consider what reconfigurations of modernism such syllabi promote.

Katherine Fusco will speak on ‘Finding Noir in Fan Magazines and Film Reviews’; Sarah Gleeson-White on ‘Teaching Black Magazine Fiction’; Alice Grundy on ‘Secrets We Can Tell: Teaching Editing from the Archive’; and Stefan Solomon on ‘Cuban Agitprop in the Classroom: Teaching Imperfect Cinema’

Katherine Fusco holds a PhD from Vanderbilt University. At the University of Nevada, Reno, she teaches U.S. film and literature. She also launched the popular cinema and media studies minor and has served as Director of Core Humanities. She's written two academic books and over a dozen articles, some of which have won the most prestigious awards in her field. She has also published in popular outlets such as The Atlantic and Harper’s Bazaar. At present, Katherine is writing a biography about Anita Loos: screenwriter, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and woman you’d want to sit next to you at a dinner party.

Sarah Gleeson-White is Associate Professor of American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She publishes widely in the fields of early-twentieth-century US, including African American, literature and film, and is the author of, most recently, Silent Film and the Formations of US Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (Oxford UP 2024). She is now at work on a new book project, “Wallace Thurman, 1922-1934: Black Authorship and Print Culture Between the Wars.”

Alice Grundy has a PhD from the ANU on Australian editing and publishing history, the first half of which was published by Cambridge University Press as a minigraph in 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review and Australian Literary Studies among others. She was a book editor for fifteen years and has taught editing at UTS and the University of Melbourne.

Stefan Solomon is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University. He researches in film studies, with particular interests in film history and historiography, in colour cinema, ecocinema, Brazilian cinema and in feminist approaches to film history. He is the author of William Faulkner in Hollywood: Screenwriting for the Studios (University of Georgia Press, 2017), co-editor with Alix Beeston of Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023) and co-editor with Lúcia Nagib of The Moving Form of Film: Historicising the Medium through Other Media (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Thursday 1 August: 1-3pm UK/2-4pm CEST/8-10am EST/10pm-12am Sydney/8-10pm HK

Decolonising the Curriculum: Teaching Race & Indigenous Literature

Participants: Kata Gyuris (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary), Claire Hurley (University of Kent), Alejandra Ortega (College of DuPage), [with more TBC]

Chair: Rehnuma Sazzad (Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Institute of English Studies)

Decolonization begins with an acceptance of the fact that colonialism continues through various systems of oppression, which are interlinked. For example, the prevalence of colonial frame of mind, colonial systems of governance, and Eurocentrism remind us that the undermining of racial and social justice exists in the world today as part of the same system, which needs to be profoundly challenged in order to free both the Global South and the Global North from the colonial practices. This is an audacious goal; because the full spectrum of decolonization involves returning confiscated land, end of racism, recognition of the ‘other’s’ humanity, acknowledging epistemologies of the South, accepting indigenous human rights, challenging patriarchy, and so on with the awareness that these are entangled processes with real-life implications. Therefore, long-time scholarly commitment to build worldwide networks for political solidarity against colonial practices is the need of the hour. As Walter Mignolo (2018) asserts in his acclaimed book, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, ‘Our interest and concern . . . are with the habits that modernity/coloniality implanted in all of us; with how modernity/coloniality has worked and continues to work to negate, disavow, distort and deny knowledges, subjectivities, world senses, and life visions.’ Clearly, decolonialism means constantly demonstrating that (neo-)colonial and other hegemonic power structures influence how past and present inequalities are represented and addressed.

With this definition in mind, our two-hour workshop will cover the three following topics: Decolonising the Curriculum; Teaching Race; and Developing Knowledge about Indigenous Literature.

A more detailed CFP is available on request (rehnuma.sazzad@yahoo.co.uk).

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Friday 2 August: 2-4pm UK/3-5pm CEST/9-11am EST/11pm-1am Sydney/9-11pm HK

Teaching Modernism Before & Beyond

Participants: Rebecca Bowler (Keele), Vassiliki Kolocotroni (Glasgow), Kristin Mahoney (Michigan State), Giles Whiteley (Stockholm)

Chair: Melissa Sarikaya (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen/Nürnberg)

Modernism’s lure for many scholars lies particularly in its connection to other movements and periods. The close affinity of modernism with fin de siècle, decadence and aestheticism is often particularly stressed by scholars, as the turn of the century particularly proves to be a dynamic period that intermingles different movements (one might also think of streams such as symbolism, impressionism or more experimental forms such as dadaism). This is further complicated by the notion that modernist literature and culture often reject classification into one singular stream. Hence, this panel discusses the relation of modernist literature, culture and philosophy with other related movements. Ancient Greek mythology often permeates modernist texts, while the Romantic tradition of fusing nature with philosophy is also characteristic for modernism. Which movements particularly influenced modernist culture and practice? What are the aftermaths of modernism? After all, can modernism be studied independently from other movements and eras?

Rebecca Bowler is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University. She is the author of Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair, and co-editor of May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds. She is co-General Editor on the forthcoming Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair.

Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the co-editor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents and The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, as well as General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. She has recently published work on late-19th c. popular fiction, and on the adaption of decadent modes by the Greek-Egyptian poet and intellectual C. P. Cavafy and his circle. Among her current projects are a study of Hellenising modernities and essays on transcultural solidarities of the 1920s.

Kristin Mahoney is Associate Professor at Michigan State University. She is a scholar on decadence (Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, 2015) and queer studies (Queer Kinship after Wilde, 2022). Mahoney is co-founder of Cusp, a journal that is devoted to the study of the dynamic period of late 19th-/early 20th- century cultures.

Giles Whiteley (Stockholm University, Sweden) → coming soon!

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Saturday 3 August: 2-4pm UK/3-5pm CEST/9-11am EST/11pm-1am Sydney/9pm-11pm HK

Teaching Modernisms Globally

Participants: Stefanie John (Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany), Boosung Kim (EWHA Womans University, South Korea), Angeliki Spiropoulou (University of the Peloponnese, Greece), Verita Sriratana (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)

Chair: Demet Karabulut Dede (Haliç University, Turkey)

Nearly a century has elapsed since the publication of seminal modernist works. Yet, their enduring impact continues to resonate across temporal and cultural boundaries. As we stand firmly in the twenty-first century, it behoves us to explore what these modernist texts have to offer and how their literary innovations intersect with our present moment. Recent scholarship has underscored the need to situate modernist literature within a larger historical and cultural dialogue—a task that becomes particularly intricate when the interpreter hails from a distinct cultural milieu. Despite these challenges, the literary artefact remains dynamic, acquiring new resonances as it intersects with the peculiarities of different times and places. In this panel, we discuss the distinctive ways in which modernist texts engage with the culture and history of the countries where they are studied. We explore how these contextual variations influence readers’ perceptions and responses to these texts, while also considering the pedagogical challenges faced in the classroom.

Stefanie John’s talk will introduce the challenges and opportunities of teaching fin de siècle literature and culture in English Studies degree programmes in Germany. Typically not having grown up in Anglophone cultures, students at German universities approach all periods of English literature from the perspective of a cultural ‘outsider’: by consequence, students tend to be unbiased concerning canonicity or quality of literary texts, yet they also face linguistic obstacles and bring varying levels of expertise in cultural and aesthetic histories to the classroom. Taking these challenges into account, she will make a case for teaching Aestheticism and Decadence as entry points to the study of global Modernisms. As international movements, connected with a rich visual and material culture and progressive political and philosophical ideas, Aesthetic and Decadent cultures speak to students’ concerns in the twenty-first century and lend themselves to teaching scenarios within and beyond Modernist studies.

Verita Sriratana is going to discuss teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses against the backdrop of the socio-political reality of Thailand. Since the 2014 coup d'état has been one of the few pleasures afforded a university lecturer who has been made to witness how the 2014 coup d'état ushered in nearly 10 excruciating years of military junta rule, which not only declared martial law, banning political gatherings and arresting anti-coup activists, but also controlled the media as well as imposed internet censorship. Since the year 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the youth-led protests against Prayut Chan-o-Cha's regime, demanding military and monarchy reforms, the label “nation-hater” [in Thai, “ชังชาติ”] has been purposely used against pro-democracy protestors. Like the Citizen in “Cyclops”, who manifests his monocular ideology of ultranationalism, for instance, the then Commander in Chief of the Army prescribed the label “nation-hater” as an incurable disease far deadlier than COVID-19. Under circumstances such as this, where hope among the young generation has been crushed, seeing how students draw critical connections between Ulysses and their reality has made the task of teaching modernisms in Thailand worthwhile as it has helped to sustain hope and, hence, save lives.

Boosung Kim will discuss South Korea’s current situation, having the world’s lowest fertility rate and largest gender pay gap. It is further complicated by anti-feminist sentiments and the government’s policies that discourage nonmarital fertility. How does it impact educational methods to teach young Korean women, referred to as Idaenyo (meaning women in their twenties), and their ways of receiving modernist texts? This paper shares her experience teaching two modernist narratives published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and St. Mawr by D. H. Lawrence, to undergraduates at South Korea’s largest women’s college. It will discuss how her students responded to issues of courtship, marriage, young women’s selfhood, and generational gaps represented in the texts while identifying themselves with young women characters such as Elizabeth Dalloway and Lou Witt. This paper offers a new perspective on reading and teaching canonical Anglo-American modernist literature in the post #MeToo era through a case study.

Angeliki Spiropoulou will share her experience of teaching literary modernism through performance in a Theatre Studies Department by using Woolf's Orlando as a case in point.

Stefanie John is a lecturer and researcher in English literature and culture at Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. Her research and teaching focus on the Romantic and Victorian periods and their legacies, with specialist interests in poetry, nature writing, and intersections of literature and material culture. Her first monograph, Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, was published with Routledge in 2021. Stefanie’s current research project examines textile objects in late Victorian literature.

Verita Sriratana is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. She earned her PhD in English from the University of St Andrews with a thesis entitled “Making Room” for One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and Technology of Place. Her first book, Particular Modernity/Modernism: Locating Modernist Moments in Czech and Slovak Literature, was published by Comenius University in Bratislava. Verita is the 2024 recipient of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Women's Forum Prize for her article entitled “I Burn (Marx’s) Paris: ‘Capital’ Cities, Alienation & Deconstruction in the Works of Bruno Jasieński”, published in Temporalities of Modernism. She has recently been awarded a research fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University.

Boosung Kim is an assistant professor of English Language and Literature at Ewha Womans University, South Korea. She teaches modern and contemporary British fiction, literary theory, and film studies. Her works have appeared in Henry James Review, Feminist Studies in English Literature (FSEL), and Journal of English Language and Literature (JELL). She has published mostly on modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson and is working on Woolf’s reception in Korea and the relationship between gender and emotion. She currently serves as secretary of MSIA and research secretary of the Virginia Woolf Society of Korea.

Angeliki Spiropoulou (MA; PhD Sussex) is Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University, Greece and Director of the MA Programme ‘Creative Writing, Theatre and Culture Industries'. She has authored the monograph Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Palgrave-Macmillan 2010), and co-authored History of European Literature 18th-20thC (Hellenic Open University 2008). She has edited or co-edited the volumes: Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity; Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Rereading Texts; Contemporary Greek Fiction: International Perspectives, and an issue on 'Gender Resistance' for EJES. She has recently contributed to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, the Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, and the volumes 1922: History, Culture, Politics (Cambridge UP) and Sentencing Orlando (Edinburgh UP). Her new monograph Topoi of the Modern is under publication. She has recently co-edited the volume Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics with Jean-Michel Rabaté and is currently working on modernist historiographies.

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Monday 5 August: 6-8pm UK/7-9pm CEST/10am-12pm PST/1-3pm EST/1-3am HK/3-5am Sydney

Transcendental Embodiment in Modernist Feminist Pedagogy

Facilitator: Jenessa Kenway (Las Vegas, Nevada)

Participants: Ewa Kowal (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland), Kelleen O’Connell-Mock (College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada), Hui Niu Wilcox (Minnesota), Shoshana Magnet (Ottawa)

In The Secret to SuperHuman Strength, a physical fitness journey steeped in transcendental poetry, Alison Bechdel discovers transcendence is not about disconnecting from attachments but profound integration. Bechdel’s graphic novel interweaves physical fitness trends from the 1960s to the present with flashbacks to Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wordsworth, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, and more in a search to understand the link between the body, enlightenment, and personal/social transformation. Knowledge achieved through the body transforms the self– transforming the world we live in begins internally. Recognition of the transformative role of embodied knowledge is a persistent theme in feminist texts from Margaret Fuller to Virginia Woolf to Bechdel. Each author recounts powerful physical experiences that result in cognitive revelations. This panel will discuss instances of embodied knowledge in feminist texts and consider ways we might harness the transformative learning power of embodied experience and texts in Modernist classrooms. Your contributions, whether it's sharing examples of transcendental embodiment you've encountered in your reading or proposing ideas for classroom activities, are crucial to our discussion.

Jenessa Kenway received her Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Her dissertation, "Feminine Aesthetics of Embodied Cognition," explores how women writers use metaphors and visual language to express feminine experiences and their intersection with race and gender. She has presented at the 2023 Modernist Studies Association Conference and, in 2021 curated an exhibition called "A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller’s ‘Femality,’” examining gender fluidity. Currently teaching at UNLV, her research interests include visual arts, ekphrasis, feminist and gender studies, embodied cognition, and transcendentalism. She emphasizes active learning through interdisciplinary activities in the classroom.

Dr hab. Ewa Kowal is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is the author of two monographs: The “Image-Event” in the Early Post-9/11 Novel: Literary Representations of Terror after September 11, 2001 (Jagiellonian UP, 2012) and The Post-Crash Decade of American Cinema: Wall Street, the “Mancession” and the Political Construction of Crisis (Jagiellonian UP, 2019), and the co-editor of The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media (Brill Fink, 2022). Her research interests are feminist studies, gender studies, masculinities studies, housing studies, happiness studies, critical animal studies, film, comics, and the visual arts.

Following her MA and PhD from King’s College London, Dr Kelleen O’Connell-Mock now lectures in her hometown of Las Vegas (BA, UNLV) in the College of Southern Nevada’s English Department. Her work is inspired by a highly culturally diverse student population: her writing, teaching, and community service work explores intersectional contexts of gender (norms/fluidity/non-binary identities), race, and socio-economic influences. In particular, she enjoys working to carve out pedagogical opportunities for equity, decolonizing the college writing experience, and empowering marginalized student voices.

Hui Niu Wilcox, Ph.D. is Dean of Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship and Professor of Sociology at Macalester College, St. Paul, MN. Born and raised in a rapidly changing China, Hui Wilcox received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2004 from the University of Minnesota. She is a founding member of Ananya Dance Theatre, a Twin Cities-based dance company centering experiences of BIPOC women and femmes around the globe. Her research and writing have been focused on sociology of dance especially in connection to ethnic and national identities, racialization, and resistance in the form of transnational feminism. Wilcox is currently researching the socio-political implications of Ethiopian cultural performance, both in Ethiopia and its diaspora. In addition to authoring journal articles in Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology, Wilcox is a co-editor of Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice (University of Washington Press 2022).

Shoshana Magnet is Full Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her books include the monograph When Biometrics Fail: Race, Gender and the Technology of Identity (Duke UP, 2011), and the edited collections The New Media of Surveillance (co-edited with Kelly Gates, Routledge 2010) and Feminist Surveillance Studies (co-edited with Rachel Dubrofsky, Duke University Press 2015). She recently co-edited (with Dr. Celeste Orr) a special issue of Feminist Theory launching the field of “Feminist Loneliness Studies” (2022) and is co-editing (along with Darby Babin and Ravida Din) a special issue of Feminism & Psychology on “Feminist Approaches to Child and Adolescent Mental Health.” Her research is on feminist approaches to children’s mental health and she writes a listserv on picturebooks aimed at helping educators, parents, pediatricians, general practitioners, and psychologists speak with children about big feelings including grief, anxiety, and fear as well as issues related to social justice including racism, settler colonialism, sexism and homo- and trans- phobias, which can be found at www.picturebookstogrow.com.

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