Modernism research group
Modernism@Manchester is a Research Group based in the Division of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at The University of Manchester. We are interested in addressing power structures historically at work during the modernist period and ideologically central to the very conception of 'modernist studies' as a disciplinary field.
Manchester has a strong and collaborative research group working in modernist studies.
Our research focuses on authors of the period, including:
- DH Lawrence
- WB Yeats
- Virginia Woolf
- Samuel Beckett
- Radclyffe Hall
- Djuna Barnes
- Laura Riding
- Sylvia Townsend Warner
- E.M. Forster
- James Joyce
- Claude McKay
- Rudyard Kipling
- Richard Bruce Nugent
As a research group, we address the concept of modernism, and such concerns as:
- Capitalism and modernity
- Postcolonial and world modernisms
- Gender, sexuality and the modern movement
- The radical cultures of modernism
- Intertextuality in modernism
- Periodising the modern
- The discourse of psychoanalysis
In addition to co-taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on modernism, we have a number of doctoral students working as part of the research group on projects spanning from obscenity trials in modernism, to modernism and mathematics.
The staff in the modernist studies group are:
- Dr Howard Booth
- Dr Daniela Caselli
- Prof. Laura Doan
- Dr Ben Harker
- Dr John Roache
- Dr Robert Spencer
- Dr Anastasia Valassopoulos
- Dr Iain Bailey
Other colleagues in English Literature and Creative Writing and American Studies have closely related research interests.
Contact
In addition to its impressive collection of books and journals on modernist literary subjects, the John Rylands Library houses a number of Special Collections which support research in this field, including:
- The Carcanet Press Archive, which includes material by HD, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Edward Carpenter, TE Hulme, Kathleen Raine, Ford Madox Ford, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Charlotte Mew, Wallace Stevens
- The Annie Horniman Papers, which chronicle the history of the Abbey and Gaiety Theatres
- The Basil Dean Archive
- Papers of CE Montague
- Papers of Allan Monkhouse
- The Katharine Tynan Collection
- The Guardian Archive, which includes a complete hard-copy set of the Guardian newspaper from 1821 to 1991, the records of the newspaper as a business, and editorial correspondence and despatches from reporters. It also includes Charles Prestwich Scott's correspondence (1872-1929) with many of the leading political and cultural figures of the time, from Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George to Emmeline Pankhurst, WB Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw.
- The Walt Whitman Manuscript Collections
Recent and upcoming events include:
- Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism Conference, 6-7 April 2018
- The Modernism@Manchester Research Group day symposium on proletarian modernism, 24 February 2017
- The Dora Marsden Lecture: Prof. Morag Shiach (QMUL), 'Modernism, meaning, and magic: "Trying to learn to use words"', 5 December 2017
- Prof. Susan Stanford Friedman (University of Wisconsin–Madison) on planetary modernism (with the Northern Modernism Seminar), 16 May 2016
Visit our events section to find out more about upcoming and past events.