New Work in Modernist Studies 2017

We are pleased to publish the programme for the seventh annual postgraduate conference in New Work in Modernist Studies, Friday 15th December 2017, hosted at the School of English, University of Leeds.
The conference is organised collaboratively between the University of Leeds and Leeds Trinity University and in conjunction with the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC), the London Modernism Seminar, the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, the Northern Modernism Seminar, the Midlands Modernist Network and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

9.30–9.50 am Registration and Coffee (Foyer and Douglas Jefferson Room)

9.50–10 am Welcome (Alumni Room)

10–11 am Parallel Panels I

1. Medicine, Science, Technology

Edward Kearns (NUI Galway), ‘Computational analysis of modernist narrative’

Robin Styles (Leicester), ‘Gertrude Stein at Harvard: The Making of an American’

Matilda Blackwell (Birmingham), ‘Closet Spaces: Reading the Bathroom in Early Twentieth-Century Literature

2. Queering the Modern

Séan Richardson (Nottingham Trent), ‘Hermaphrodite Temporality: The Queer Chronology of Katharine Burdekin’s Proud Man’

Adrienne Mortimer (Leeds), ‘Everywhere at the wrong time, becoming anonymous: Time, Narrative, and Negation in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood’

Dickon Edwards (Birkbeck), ‘Ronald Firbank and the Legacy of Camp Modernism’

11–12.10 pm Parallel Panels II

3. Conflicting Times: War, Politics, Resistance

Eoghan Ryan (NUI Galway), ‘Unity through chaos: the integrated modernism of F.R. Higgins’

Joseph Owen (Southampton), ‘The Modernist Oak in Woolf’s Orlando: Carl Schmitt and the Failure of Political Symbol’

Yu Nagashima (KCL), ‘Modernist Voices in Louis MacNeice’s Radio Drama and Features during the Second World War’

4. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (Chaired by Midlands Modernist Network)

Peter Adkins (Kent), ‘Unclean Beasts: Reading Djuna Barnes in the era of Anthropocene Studies’

Saskia McCracken (Glasgow), ‘The Darwinian Politics of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Worm Winged like an Eagle’’

12.10–1 pm Lunch (Douglas Jefferson Room) and BAMS AGM (Seminar Room 5)

1–2 pm Parallel Panels III

5. Planetary Modernisms

Yaqing Xie (Nottingham), ‘Cultural Transvestism: G. Lowes Dickinson and China’

Wei Zhou (Leeds), ‘Diasporic Homecoming in the Poetry of T.S.Eliot’

Aran Ward Sell (Edinburgh), ‘Half-Formed Modernism: Eimear McBride and the post-crash resurgence of Irish literary modernism’

6. Reading, Performing, and Ageing the New Woman

Jade French (QMUL), ‘Mina Loy’s ‘Facial Destiny’: The Mask of Ageing & Auto-Facial- Construction’

Yas Kabuto (RHUL), ‘Belatedness and Possibilities: Virginia Woolf’s Novels Read in Relation to Post-Darwinian Discoveries and Discourses’

Gaby Fletcher (NUI Galway), ‘Reading ‘Fluffy Ruffles’ in Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton’

2.00– 2.50 pm BAMS Careers Panel (Alumni Room)

This panel with BAMS postgraduate representative Helen Saunders (KCL) will discuss a BAMS survey into career expectations among PhD students of modernism. It will include a Q&A session.

Chair: Ruth Clemens (Leeds Trinity)

2.50–3.20 pm Coffee break (Douglas Jefferson Room)

3.20–4.30 pm Parallel Panels  IV

7. Me, Myself, and Not I : Modernist Subjectivities

Lillian Hingley (Oxford), ‘Work in Progress’, Indeed! : Trying to Understand Joyce’s Influence on Adorno’

Lilly Markaki (RHUL), ‘“A little game between ‘I’ and ‘me’”: Marcel Duchamp, Autonomy and the Self’

Imola Nagy-Seres (Exeter), ‘Elizabeth Bowen and the ethics of ‘sensitive touch’’

Angela Harris (Durham), ‘Virginia Woolf’s Ecstasy and Terror’

8. Modernism Beyond Words

Amjad AlShalan (Salford), ‘Doodles as Readable Texts: The Presence of Astrological Signs in Beckett’s Murphy’

Tiana Fischer (NUI Galway), ‘Towards an Alternative Media Theory of Modernism

Jaime Ellen Church (Wolverhampton), ‘Politics of Dance in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save me the Waltz’

Jack Quin (York), ‘Inviting a ‘Marmorean Muse’: W.B. Yeats’s Language of Sculpture’

4.30–5.30 pm Keynote presentation

Dr Hope Wolf, University of Sussex, on the topic of ‘Sussex Modernism’

Chaired by Dr Richard Brown, University of Leeds

5.30–6.30 pm Wine reception (Douglas Jefferson Room)