The Executive Steering Committee for 2026 is as follows:
Dr Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University): Chair (Jan-July); Past Chair (July onwards)
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 Claire Drewery (Sheffield Hallam University): Vice-Chair (Jan-July); Chair (July onwards)
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 Rob Hawkes (Teesside University): Past Chair / Treasurer (Jan-July)
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 Jade Elizabeth French (Loughborough University): Secretary
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 Daniel Abdalla (Liverpool University): EDI Officer (on sabbatical Jan-July)
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 Rehnuma Sazzad (University of East Anglia): Acting EDI Officer (Jan-July)
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): Treasurer (July onwards)
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 Doug Battersby (University of Leicester)
Doug Battersby is a Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Leicester. His interdisciplinary research explores how novelists’ representations of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations evolve in dialogue with changing cultural, scientific, and philosophical understandings of physiology, subjectivity, and gender and sexuality. His debut monograph, Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, Feeling, and the Novel Form (OUP, 2022), was shortlisted for the MSA and English Association first book prizes. A second monograph, Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel, will be published by OUP in 2027. Doug is the author of a dozen book chapters and articles for journals such as ELH, PMLA, MFS, Journal of Modern Literature, and Modernism/modernity. His essay on Ford Madox Ford was awarded the 2021 BAMS Essay Prize and published in Modernist Cultures.
Dr Rhonda Mayne (Queens University Belfast)
Rhonda Mayne is a scholar of modernist literature with particular expertise in the work of Virginia Woolf and research interests in dance, gender, social class, rhythm, and embodiment. Her work explores how formal features such as movement, voice, and temporal patterning produce social and political meaning in modernist texts. She has presented her research at national and international conferences and is committed to fostering inclusive, interdisciplinary dialogue within the modernist scholarly community.
Dr Rachel Murray (University of Bristol)
Rachel Murray is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment and co-director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on modernist and twentieth-century literature, animal studies, and the blue humanities. She is the author of The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (EUP, 2020), and the editor of Blue Extinction in Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2024).
Postgraduate Reps:
Hettie Garnham (University of East Anglia)
Hettie Garnham is a first year PhD student at the University of East Anglia. She is researching Modernist Wise Women in the literature of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Natalie Clifford Barney, Virginia Woolf, and Colette. The project delves into each of these writers, and traverses the ways in which women, wisdom, and aging becomes vital to their work, and the wider Modernist scene. Bluesky: https://bluesky.app/profile/hettiegarnham.bsky.social
Vedika Kaushal (Shiv Nadar University, India)
Vedika Kaushal is a fourth-year PhD student in English Literature at Shiv Nadar University, India. Her research concerns the broad fields of Indian English literature and modernist studies exploring the rise of the modern Indian English novel between the 1930 – 60s. She is interested in working with lesser-known texts and alternative methodologies to recover the early Indian English novel as a space for working out political and aesthetic anxieties, whether they were international, national or regional. Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/vedikaushal.bsky.social
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.
Xinyi Zhao (University of Edinburgh)
Xinyi Zhao is a first-year PhD student in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research interest lies in global modernisms and the Blue Humanities, and her doctoral project investigates modernist engagements with the ocean in a transnational context, with a particular focus on Anglophone writing by seamen from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/xyzhao.bsky.social
BAMS Advisory Board:
Ian Bell, Department of American Studies, Keele University
Jonathan Bignell, Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading
Ramsey Burt, Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities, De Montfort University
Sascha Bru, Department of Literary Studies & MDRN, University of Leuven
María Del Pilar Blanco, Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford
Laura Doan, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester
Vivien Gardner, Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, University of Manchester
Graeme Gilloch, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
Susan Harrow, School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol
Ben Highmore, School of Media, Film, and Music, University of Sussex
Julian Murphet, School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Peter Osborne, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London
Barbara Penner, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
David Peters Corbett, Centre for American Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
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.
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