Current Committee

The Executive Steering Committee for 2022 is as follows:

Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla (University of Liverpool)

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. 

Rebecca Bowler (Keele University): Secretary

Rebecca Bowler is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2013, and then held a Research Assistant post (British Academy funded) and Research Associate PostDoc (AHRC funded) at Keele University, working on the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project (OUP). She has held her current lectureship since 2016. She is the author of Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., and May Sinclair (2016) and co-edited May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds (2017). She is a co-founder of the May Sinclair Society and General Editor on the forthcoming Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair (EUP). Her next monograph project is Modernist Wellness: Transatlantic Literary Dietetics. She is on the organising team of the recently rebooted Northern Modernism Seminar programme, the fisrt of which she recently hosted at Keele.

Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University): Membership Secretary
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.

Udith Dematagoda (Waseda University): Web Officer
Originally from Scotland, Udith Dematagoda is Assistant Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. He received his PhD in English from The University of Glasgow in 2016. From 2017-2020, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, an institute of advanced study based in the University of Konstanz, and has held visiting positons at Cornell and Johns Hopkins. He is author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic (2017), and editor of Left Wings Over Europe, a volume of the Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis forthcoming through Oxford University Press. His second monograph, nearing completion, explores the confluence of masculinity, technology and ideology within fascist modernisms. Apart from Lewis, it considers work by Louis Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Henry de Montherlant, Julius Evola, and Gottfried Benn, among others. He is also the general editor of Hyperidean Press, an independent literary press dedicated to experimental prose and poetry which he co-founded in 2020.

Andrew Frayn (Edinburgh Napier University): Chair
Andrew Frayn is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University, where he is also Programme Leader for the BA(Hons) English degree.  Key publications include Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose 1914-30 (2014), along with special issues of Modernist Cultures (12.1, 2017) and the Journal of War and Culture Studies (11.3, 2018).  He has published extensively on the First World War and modernist studies, particularly on Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford.  As well as continuing to write on First World War literature, he is working on projects about late style and late modernism, and the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson.

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (University of Bristol)
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol. Her research explores ideas of embodiment and subjectivity through considering the interrelations and intersections between literature, culture (especially film), philosophy, medicine, and science. Prior to joining Bristol in September 2018, she worked at the University of Oxford in the role of Knowledge Exchange Facilitator. She maintains a deep interest in, and enthusiasm for, knowledge exchange and impact-focused activities and works closely with the Science Museum, London. Her first book, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Her most recent publication is a chapter entitled ‘James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Blind Bards in the Age of Silent Cinema’, in Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, ed. Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak (forthcoming, 2020). She is currently working on a new monograph entitled Multifocal Modernism: Literature and Non-normative Vision.

Rob Hawkes (Teesside University)
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.

Daniel Moore (University of Birmingham)
Dan Moore is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. His monograph Insane Acquaintances: The Mediators of Modernism in Britain 1910–1939 is due to be published in 2019 (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 joined the BAMS committee in 2017.

Beryl Pong (University of Sheffield)
Beryl Pong is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in English at the University of Sheffield. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her monograph, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, is forthcoming in 2020 from Oxford University Press’s Mid-Century Studies Series. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, and Literature & History. She is the current holder of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, as well as a commissioning editor of Literature Compass.

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 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. He is currently working on modernist life writing and celebrity culture, including editing a critical volume of Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering for Oxford University Press.

Matthew Taunton (University of East Anglia): Treasurer
Dr. Matthew Taunton is a Senior Lecturer 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). His work is published or forthcoming in journals including Textual Practice, ELH, and Women: A Cultural Review, and he has also published a number of book chapters. He is deputy editor of Critical Quarterly.

Juliette Taylor-Batty (Leeds Trinity University): Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer
I am a Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University and have worked in the HE sector since 2003. I am currently programme coordinator for English Literature, and have held a range of administrative posts, including student employability, admissions, and internationalisation. I am on the organising committee of the newly-relaunched BAMS Northern Modernism Seminar. My first monograph, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), focused on the use of different languages by Anglophone modernists. I have articles and chapters published and forthcoming on Rhys, Jolas, Joyce, Beckett, Baudelaire, Nabokov and Rushdie, and am the co-author of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Bloomsbury, 2009). I have a particular interest in comparative and global approaches to modernism, and work across languages and literary traditions.

Alex Thomson (University of Edinburgh)
Alex Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He is a former Chair of the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies. He is the author of Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (Continuum, 2005) and Theodor Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2006), as well as essays on topics in critical theory, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish literature. He edits the book series ‘Taking on the Political’ for Edinburgh University Press. Among his current research interests are comparative and transnational perspectives on modernism in Britain, and the changing relationship between the ideas of nation, race, culture, ethnicity in the period.

Claire Warden (Loughborough University) Past Chair
Claire Warden is Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary modernism, theatre history, performance practice, politics and physical culture. She is the author of British Avant-garde Theatre (2012), Modernist and Avant-garde Performance: An Introduction (2015) and the British Academy-funded Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels through Russia (2016). She is co-editor of Performance and Professional Wrestling (2016) and part of the Arts Council-funded Wrestling Resurgence collective. Her most recent work includes articles on Russian translator Elisaveta Fen (Theatre Survey 2019) and the modernist origins of ‘all-in’ wrestling (Modernism/modernity 2020).

Postgraduate Representatives:

Jinan Ashraf (Dublin City University)

Jinan Ashraf is an Ireland India Institute doctoral candidate at the School of English at Dublin City University. Her doctoral study situates itself in the context of Irish and Indian Modernisms, proposing as methodology a close reading of select texts, correspondences, critical and political writings that expose and explore James Joyce’s connections with the modern Indian novel in English, with a focus on avant-garde women writers in India, through an exploration of key formal, thematic and postcolonial concerns in the novel. In 2021, her work on Joyce and Indian modernism was awarded the Laura Bassi scholarship for research on neglected literary traditions broadly construed in English. She is published in The Modernist Review and her essay on James Joyce and critical pedagogy in India is out in a Routledge publication on English Studies in India (ed. Nandana Dutta).

Emily Bell (University of Antwerp) (2021-23)
Emily Bell is a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp (Centre for Manuscript Genetics), researching intertextuality in the works of James Joyce and other near-contemporaneous intertextualists. Her PhD also comprises the realisation of a digital edition of Joyce’s library. She previously studied at the National University of Ireland, Galway (MA, 2019) and the University of Oxford (BA, 2017). She has presented at the James Joyce Italian Foundation’s annual conference and New Work in Modernist Studies. She has also published in the James Joyce Broadsheet.

Jennifer Cameron (University of Hertfordshire) (2021-23)
Jennifer Cameron is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. She is currently researching the cultural and social significance of the colour of dress in modernist literature, written by women in the 1920s. Prior to this she holds a Master of Arts with Distinction in English Literature from the University of Hertfordshire and an LLB (Hons) from the University of Glasgow. She is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, teaching English Literature, and has presented her work at the New Work in Modernist Studies conference and at the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. She has also published in The Modernist Review.

Elena Valli (Trinity College Dublin)

Elena Valli is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin. Her project, founded by the Fitzroy-Pyle scholarship, reflects on the influence of 17^th-century spiritual meditative exercises on the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, and Geoffrey Hill. Through this research, Elena is studying the transition from modernism to postmodernism and considering these authors’ indebtedness to T.S. Eliot in terms of shifting perspectives on witness and vision, representation of place, and religious values. She holds an MA with Distinction in English and American Literature from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari (2020) and a BA in English and French from the University of Bologna (2017). She is a member of the T.S. Eliot International Society and has contributed to the society’s review, Time Present. 

Hannah Voss (Durham University) (2021 -2023)

Hannah Voss is a PhD candidate at Durham University, funded by a Durham Doctoral Studentship. Her thesis explores the representations of split identity, self-erasure, and alternative belonging in the work of mid-twentieth century women writers, especially H.D., Jean Rhys, and Anne Stevenson. She received her MA from Durham in 2019 and holds a BA (2018) from Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas. She has presented her work at New Work in Modernist Studies and published in The Modernist Review. She currently serves as co-editor of the Postgraduate English journal at Durham University, and is coming into her final months in the role.

BAMS Advisory Board: