Election Update: We have received one application for the one available senior position on the BAMS Executive Steering Committee. We hereby declare that this candidate will be elected unopposed at the end of the election period. Due to unforeseen circumstances, which have delayed this announcement and the commencement of voting, the election period has been extended until 28 March 2025.
The candidate for the senior position is Daniel Abdalla.
For the postgraduate representative positions, there are three candidates for two places. You can vote for up to 2 candidates. The candidates are listed below in alphabetical order by surname. On the ballot the name order is randomized.
The candidates for the postgraduate representative positions are Anna Dijkstra, Jenny Kenyon, and Lily Martin.
Candidate Statement: Senior Position
Daniel Abdalla
I joined the BAMS Executive Committee for the first time in 2022. Highlights from my past term include serving as EDI officer and hosting New Work in Modernist Studies ’23 at the University of Liverpool (which was organised by Rebecca Bowler and me). I am a Lecturer with a focus on, among other topics, Modern Drama and Global Modernisms, at the University of Liverpool. Alongside this research, I have a sustained interest in working to support graduate students. In my second term, I would look forward to working more closely with the Postgraduate Representatives, developing an EDI survey for BAMS, and helping to organise another NWiMS. My own experience as an international student in the UK from a group underrepresented in UK Higher Education has been a foundation for my work in the academy.
Bio:
Dr Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla is Lecturer in English Literature 1800-present at the University of Liverpool. His first monograph (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan) looks at the ways prominent American writers Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Robins and W.E.B. Du Bois engaged with scientific ideas about heredity. His new project considers the relationship between literature and the natural environment, with a particular focus on drama.
Candidate Statements: Postgraduate Representatives
Anna Dijkstra
I spent the last few years professionally somewhat outside the academic world, during which I was lucky to find a scholarly home in the British Association for Modernist Studies – participating in New Work in Modernist Studies twice, attending Ephemeral Modernisms, and writing for The Modernist Review. Now that I have returned to postgraduate study, I would love to become more involved with BAMS, and give back to a community so meaningful to me.
Primarily, I would like to continue the wonderful work of the current postgraduate representatives: The Modernist Review as a ground where new and established scholarship comes together, NWiMS as an exciting opportunity for students to give their first conference presentations and others to catch up with old friends, and #modwrite as a weekly point of connection. I would be particularly excited to seek new collaborations with other organisations to further facilitate opportunities for early career researchers, and explore the possibility for initiating research networks to foster collaboration.
My experience makes me well-suited to meeting these goals; as international project coordinator of CLS INFRA, I organised summer schools in Vienna and Madrid with up to 100 participants. I gained further organising, managing and administrative experience in roles from treasurer to supervisory chair in a student organisation and by leading the committee overseeing four master’s programmes during my degree at the University of Amsterdam. Finally, I have always enjoyed editorial work, serving three years as editor-in-chief and managing editor of Soapbox Journal, and recently guest editing a modernist issue of Echinox Journal.
Biography:
Anna Dijkstra is a literary researcher with a focus on modernism and epistemology. After completing degrees in philosophy, English and literary studies at the University of Amsterdam, she is currently an MPhil student in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, researching Wittgensteinian silences and irrationality in H.D.’s HERmione. Her work has previously appeared in publications including The Modernist Review and the online platform of the British Society for Literature and Science, and she has been involved with various research projects including the AHRC-funded Novel Perceptions project and the ERC-advanced funded Moral Residue project.
Jenny Kenyon
I have been a BAMS member since 2022, attending Ephemeral Modernisms and NWiMS 13, and presenting at NWiMS 14. Membership has been invaluable in my academic development and in forming a network of like-minded modernists, so I am eager to give back to the Association as a PGR representative.
I have benefited first-hand from the supportive atmosphere created by BAMS and would seek to continue building our community. During my MA I served as our course’s Postgraduate Representative, gathering feedback, effecting change and mediating between cohort and faculty. I’m keen to build on this experience and contribute to the Association’s ongoing work to broaden its accessibility and inclusivity, and would work with the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity Officer on outreach to underrepresented groups in the PGR and ECR communities.
The Modernist Review provides an excellent opportunity for postgraduate researchers, and I would be excited to collaborate with the PGR team in editing and promoting the journal. I’m experienced in managing WordPress websites, have edited articles for the UCL journal Moveable Type and will be acting as General Editor for the SWW DTP journal, Question. I would like to encourage more creative and interdisciplinary submissions to TMR, including poetry, prose, visual and sound art.
My experience as a Marketing Director would help me to grow the BAMS social media presence, where I would run additional activities alongside the weekly #ModWrite, including dialogues with TMR contributors, interviews with authors, and engagement with cultural events, like the Tate Modern’s upcoming ‘Nigerian Modernism’ exhibition.
Biography:
I’m a first-year PhD student at Bristol and Exeter, funded by the SWW DTP. My research focuses on the impact of sound technologies, especially radio, on the work of Patrick Hamilton. Previous publications include an article on suffering and breakdown of speech in Hamilton’s radio dramas for Poltergeist, and an exploration of the difficulties in communicating to and about India in the radio broadcasts of E. M. Forster and Louis MacNeice for Moveable Type, alongside book reviews for Sound Studies and The Modernist Review. I’ve presented work at conferences for UCL, Trinity College Dublin, and most recently for BAMS NWiMS 14. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and my MA from UCL. In my spare time you can find me tramping alongside hedgerows and petting cats.
Lily Martin
I would be honoured to be an active part of the welcoming, inclusive BAMS network and, thereby become involved in discovering and promoting the new research being carried out in the wider modernist community. I have the privilege of being a member of the BAMS community, both attending and presenting at the NWiMS Conference over the past two years, where I witnessed firsthand the valuable role the PG Reps play in supporting these events, and I would love the opportunity to also work behind the scenes. Outside of attending the in-person events, I have also interacted with the BAMS community online, and my experience with social media, including Bluesky, would be useful for the role. My PhD is a digital humanities project, so I am keen to learn and put into practice new digital skills; although I do not have direct experience of WordPress, I am familiar with Everweb, another website-building platform. Indeed, editing for The Modernist Review would not only provide the opportunity to develop my editorial skills, but also to work collaboratively with other researchers and gain insight into the vast array of different perspectives in modernist studies. In addition to fulfilling the PG Rep duties, I envision developing the modernist PGR community by increasing the frequency of the PGR training days run in previous years as well as establishing further networking events, such as online informal presenting sessions that would provide an opportunity to practice presenting skills, receive feedback, and discover what approaches fellow PGRs are pursuing.
Biography:
Lily Martin is in the first year of her NWCDTP AHRC-funded PhD at Keele University, where she also undertook her English and American Literature BA and English Literatures MA. Her doctoral thesis is entitled ‘Fitness and Spatiality: Mapping Modernist Literary Hotels’ and researches the circulation of bodies within the hotel spaces of early twentieth-century literature, with particular emphasis on fitness and the fit-for-purpose body. The project employs digital map-making to analyse spatial and cognitive relationships between a hotel and its local environment and visualise the ways bodies experience certain places.
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