Current Committee

The Executive Steering Committee for 2025 is as follows:

Dr Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University): Chair

Dr Barbara Cooke is the Research Theme Lead for Textual Editing and Interpretation at Loughborough University. Her interests in twentieth-century and modernist (auto)biography, life writing and archival research underpin her current project, OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. She serves as co-executive editor with Professor Martin Stannard on this 43-volume edition, under the general editorship of Alexander Waugh. She has recently co-edited Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning for the project and is now at work on the autobiographical ‘conversation piece’ The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. She has written on twentieth-century literary subjects for The Conversation, is contributing to the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernism and the Archive, and serves on the Editorial Board of OUP’s Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford.

Dr Rob Hawkes (Teesside University): Past Chair / Treasurer

Rob Hawkes is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and co-editor of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: The First World War, Culture, and Modernity (Rodopi, 2014); War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford (Routledge, 2015). His more recent research focuses on the topic of trust. He contributed ‘Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’ to the collection Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak, ed. Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and he is now working on a monograph on literature, money, and trust from the 1890s to the 1980s. He is a Fellow of the English Association and a member of the Executive Committee of the Ford Madox Ford Society.

Dr Claire Drewery (Sheffield Hallam University): Secretary

I am a Senior Lecturer in twentieth-century literature at Sheffield Hallam University. Together with Prof Suzanne Raitt and Dr Rebecca Bowler, I am co-founder of the May Sinclair Society and General/Volume Editor of the Edinburgh Sinclair Critical Editions.  I have long-standing research interests in modernism, women’s writing, textual editing and archival research, as well as aesthetic and cultural discourses surrounding the abstract intellect and material bodies. Publications include Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, (Ashgate 2011), May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds (Edinburgh 2017), and One Hundred Years of The Stream of Consciousness, Literature Compass, Special Issue: 17:6 (2020).

Dr Daniel Abdalla (Liverpool University): EDI Officer

Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla is a Research Fellow in the Department of English, University of Liverpool. His research is on literature from the period 1880-1920 and focuses on the ways that authors engage with evolutionary biology. Currently, he is completing a monograph on how Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution influenced the works of four prominent American writers: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Robins, and W. E. B. Du Bois. This project is based on his recently completed doctoral thesis in English at the University of Oxford, where he was Esmond Harmsworth Graduate Scholar at the Rothermere American Institute, as well as doctoral research assistant on the European Research-funded project Diseases of Modern Life. At Liverpool, he also serves as Deputy Director of the Literature and Science Hub Research Centre and his most recent publication appeared in Modern Drama. 

Dr Noreen Masud (Bristol University): Web/IT Officer

Noreen is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She finished her DPhil in 2018, and went on to do a three-year postdoc at Durham before taking up her current role. Her first monograph is Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (OUP, 2022) and her first trade book is A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton and Melville House, 2023). Her second monograph, nearing completion, is on flat landscapes in twentieth-century literature including D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020, and enjoys making radio programmes around her research.

Dr Jade Elizabeth French (Loughborough University)

Dr Jade Elizabeth French is a Leverhulme Early Career Researcher in English at Loughborough University, focusing on twentieth-century literature and visual art, with particular interests in ageing, care, and intergenerationality. She has most recently published articles in Modernist Cultures, The Gerontologist and Poetics Today, and her monograph Modernist Poetics of Ageing The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and H.D. is available with Oxford University Press. Jade also co-runs the research project ‘Decorating Dissidence’, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic, and political qualities of craft from modernism to the contemporary.

Dr Sean Ketteringham (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds)

Dr Sean Ketteringham is an interdisciplinary postdoctoral researcher specialising in cultural formations of nation and empire in Britain in the early and mid-twentieth century. Working across literary studies, cultural studies, art history, and architectural history, his work is concerned with how creative production impacts modern communities, nation states, class, and heritage. His AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Oxford in 2022, examined how modern domestic architecture and its associated literary cultures responded to the decline of the British Empire and the shifting state of English national identity between 1914 and 1948. His first article based on this work was published in Modernist Cultures in January 2022. He has worked extensively in heritage, freelance consultancy, and on research residencies including at the Harry Ransom Center, Texas, Twentieth Century Society, John Latham Foundation (Flat Time House), Grizedale Arts, Charles Moore Foundation, and Archio. From 2023-25 he will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Dr Rod Rosenquist (University of Northampton)

Rod Rosenquist is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton.  He is author of Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New (CUP 2009) and articles on modernist celebrity, advertising and autobiography in journals including Genre, Critical Survey and Modernist Cultures.  With John Attridge, he co-edited Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception (Ashgate 2013), and with Alice Wood, he co-edited ‘Modernism in Public’, a special issue of Modernist Cultures (November 2016). He has held funded fellowships at the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas, and peer reviewed for OUP, EUP, Bloomsbury and Modernism/modernity, as well as serving on the steering committee for the British Association of Modernist Studies since 2020.  He is currently working on a critical volume of Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering for Oxford University Press.

Dr Rehnuma Sazzad (University of East Anglia)

Dr Rehnuma Sazzad is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study (SAS), University of London, and an Associate Tutor at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia. She is an Associate Editor and a Reviews Editor of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and an Editorial Advisory Board Member for English: Journal of the English Association. Her first monograph, Edward Said’s Concept of Exile (2017), adds new depths to discourses of resistance, home and identity. She has published considerably on postcolonial and world literatures (e.g. The International Journal of Human Rights 2021, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2016, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2015). She is currently completing her second monograph reflecting on nationalism in South Asia, and co-editing Édouard Glissant’s Search for New Horizons of Relation: Visions of Transcultural Archipelago.

Dr Luke Seaber (University College London)

Luke Seaber is Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture on the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate for the Humanities (of which he is also Senior Co-Ordinator) at University College London. He is author of G.K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (2012) and Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (2017). He has published various articles and chapters on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is co-editor (with Michael McCluskey) of Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (2020) and (with Nick Hubble and Elinor Taylor) the volume on the 1930s in the Bloomsbury Decades of Fiction series (2021). He also co-wrote (with Kate Macdonald and Daniel Kilburn) the introductions to Handheld Press’s 2022 republication of the complete works of John Llewelyn Rhys. He is Co-President (2023-26) of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945.

Dr Matt Taunton (University of East Anglia)

Dr Matthew Taunton is an Associate Professor in Literature at the University of East Anglia, with broad interests in modernist, 1930s and mid-century literature and culture—with a particular focus on literature’s political entanglements. He completed his PhD at the London Consortium (Birkbeck) in 2008. He is the author of Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (Palgrave, 2009) and Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (OUP, 2019), and the co-editor (with Benjamin Kohlmann) of A History of 1930s British Literature (CUP, 2019), as well as a special issue of Literature & History called Literatures of Anti-Communism (2015). He has published in journals including Textual Practice, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies and Women: A Cultural Review, and in numerous edited volumes. He is senior deputy editor of Critical Quarterly.

Postgraduate Reps:

Jingjing Cao (University of Exeter)

Jingjing Cao is a third year PhD student in Department of English and Creative Writing at University of Exeter. Her dissertation focuses on the cross-cultural literary communications between the Bloomsbury group and the Chinese Crescent Moon Society, with a specific focus on Virginia Woolf and two Chinese female writers, Ling Shuhua and Lin Huiyin, in the context of global modernisms. She has attended conferences, e.g., “Difficult Conversations in Modernist Studies”, “Virginia Woolf & Ecologies II”, etc. Her research interests lie in Sino-Anglo literary interactions, the legacy of Victorianism to modernism, and global modernisms.

Jung-Hsin Hsieh (King’s College London)

Jung-Hsin Hsieh is a second-year Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at King’s College London. Jung-Hsin’s doctoral research investigates expressions of nostalgia for eighteenth-century literature during the British modernist period (1900-1940), focusing on modernist writers’ reception and literary recovery of eighteenth-century women’s writings. Before joining King’s, Jung-Hsin gained several years of experience in the media industry. She completed her MA in Comparative Literature at University College London and her BA in English at National Taiwan Normal University.

Jenny Kenyon (Bristol and Exeter)

Jenny Kenyon is a first-year PhD student at Bristol and Exeter, funded by the SWW DTP. Her 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. Jenny has presented work at conferences for UCL, Trinity College Dublin, and most recently for BAMS NWiMS 14. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and my MA from UCL. In her spare time you can find her tramping alongside hedgerows and petting cats.

Lily Martin (Keele University)

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.

Ryan O’Shea (Queen Mary University of London)

Ryan O’Shea is a second-year PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. His research focuses on mortifications of the flesh in modernist literature, intersecting with spiritual, psychological, and sensory contexts in the twentieth century. The project takes a cross-religious approach, exploring how modernist depictions of the practice interact with different cultural contexts and modes of spirituality. His work has been published in The Modernist Review, Lost Modernists, Research in English at Durham, and the Postgraduate English Journal. He also is a coordinator of Queen Mary English PGRS – a series of fortnightly research seminars by academics hosted at the University.

Modernist Cultures Liaison:

Professor Dan Moore (University of Birmingham)

Dan Moore is Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. His monograph Insane Acquaintances: Visual Modernism and Public Taste in Britain, 1910-1951 was published in 2020 (British Academy Monograph Series), and he has also published on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and modernist art writing. He was the co-organiser of the 2017 BAMS conference – ‘Modernist Life’ – at Birmingham. He served on the BAMS committee between 2017-2021 and was our Chair in 2020.

BAMS Advisory Board: