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Modernities: Literature, Theory & Culture

Who we are

Alex Benchimol is the author of Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, English Radicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere  (Ashgate, 2010) and has contributed reviews, review articles and essays to journals in critical theory, cultural history and social theory, including Textual Practice, Thesis Eleven, and Radical Philosophy. He has recently edited, with Willy Maley, a collection of essays on the public sphere entitled Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas. Dr Benchimol’s research explores the history of intellectual practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and the US, and he has maintained a longstanding interest in the theoretical work of Habermas and the British Cultural Studies tradition.

Fabienne Collignon is particularly interested in American techno-culture and machine aesthetics. Her work to date focuses mainly on Cold War dream weapons and their implantations in the land. She has recently also worked on narratives of plastic utopia; the insidious Cold War appropriation of Antarctica; the linkage between electricity and vampirism, and has published articles in Textual Practice, CTheory and Configurations.

John Coyle’s main work at the moment is a series of essays on Proust and anglophone writers. Rather than an influence study, the resulting monograph will seek to examine writers from other traditions (Irish, English, American, Russian,Victorian) through Proustian lenses, while  also confronting Proust’s work with these other examples. This ties in with a general tendency in his work to consider Modernism and its aftermath within an international context. His edition of Ford Madox Ford’s It Was the Nightingale for Carcanet Press appeared in 2007 and will be followed by editions of Ford’s Provence and Great Trade Routes.  While Proust and Joyce remain central concerns, among other recent publications have been studies of John Ruskin; Saul Bellow, Eve Sedgwick and Allan Bloom; Don DeLillo; and a retrospective piece on Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Catherine Belsey. Recent successfully supervised theses have been on Alasdair Gray and the technological text, Marilyn Hacker and the Kenyon Review, Gothic as generic determinant in twentieth century dystopian fiction, and Paul Auster  and the Oulipo group. Among work currently supervised are theses on Stephen King, American psychotic geographies, and Joyce and Dante.

Matthew Creasy works mainly on the writings of James Joyce, but he also has interests in the influence of French Symbolism upon early Modernism, the criticism and poetry of William Empson and the works of Samuel Beckett. Recently, he has published essays upon the reception of Shakespeare in Ireland and on the literary affinities between Joyce and Flaubert. He is currently editing a volume of essays examining Joyce and Error for European Joyce Studies.

Chris Gair has written numerous articles and books, mainly in his chief research areas, late 19th and early 20th century American literary and visual culture, the Beat Generation and the American Counterculture. He is the editor of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations and edited Beyond Boundaries: CLR James and Postnational Studies (Pluto, 2006). He has recently completed a book on the Beat Generation and has now returned to a long-term interest in the World’s Columbian Exposition (the ‘White City’, staged in Chicago in 1893) and its links with American literary and visual cultures of the time. His work in this area assesses the significance of the Exposition in terms of the new American history, literature, art, and anthropology that emerged during a time of social and political transformation in and beyond the United States, as immigration and imperialism redefined understanding of class and ethnic relations at national and international levels. He has published essays on Mark Twain, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Henry James and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Chicago (2001) and Yale University (2009).

Jane Goldman is Co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Writings of Virginia Woolf.  She is author of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge UP, 1998) and co-editor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh UP & Chicago UP, 1998). Her recent publications include Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse (Palgrave, 2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge UP, 2006). She is editor of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse for Cambridge, and is currently writing a book, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. Her research and teaching interests include: Modernism and the Avant-Garde, Virginia Woolf Studies, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Fiction, Literary Theory (including theories of gender, sexuality and feminism), American Literature, Comparative Literature, interartistic analogy, and canine aesthetics. She is particularly interested in the work of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, and Kurt Schwitters. She has a developing interest in Creative Writing.

Vassiliki Kolocotroni’s main research interests lie in the areas of Modernism and theory. She is the co-editor, with Jane Goldmand and Olga Taxidou, of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh & Chicago UP 1998). In recent years, Vassiliki has studied the work of Surrealist theorist and polemicist Nicolas Calas and has edited and translated Calas’s French poetry and his correspondence with William Carlos Williams (Ypsilon Books, 2002).  She has also co-edited an anthology of writings by British women travellers in Greece from 1718-1932 (In the Country of the Moon, Hestia, 2005), and a collection of essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel (Women Writing Greece, Rodopi, 2008). These projects reflect her interest in the subject of Hellenism and more specifically its uses by Modernist writers, which is the focus of her next book. In preparation for that study, she has published articles on Freud, Conrad, Joyce and Woolf and their encounters with classicism and modern Greece and is commissioned to write an essay on Woolf and the Classics for Virginia Woolf in Context (edited by Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall). She has also published on film, on the theoretical and fictional writings of Julia Kristeva (including an interview with the theorist that is now anthologized in a Columbia UP collection), and Muriel Spark. Topics of completed and current research projects supervised include: T. S. Eliot’s philosophical poetics; cult fiction; the British literary manifesto; British women travellers in Greece; political performance art in 1970s America (jointly with the Glasgow School of Art); women writers of the Beat generation; creolization and postcolonial theory; the cyborg in fiction and art; British women and the Spanish Civil War; the dialogue between modern Greek and English poetry; Nicolas Calas’s curatorial work  (for the London Consortium); and Joyce’s Dante.

Paddy Lyons is interested in how social movements of the nineteenth century generated linguistic and iconographic bases for twentieth century Irish writing. Recent publications draw on Althusser and Lacan to address Yeats’s poetry in relation to the pedagogy of mass  literacy; and on gender theory, to examine present-day Irish writing  in relation to the legacy of the Young Irelanders and post-Famine  culture. Other recent publications have been on the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, the fiction of Doris Lessing, and the films of Pedro Almodóvar. Recently he has supervised successful theses on Muriel Spark, Brian Friel, and Seamus Heaney, and he is currently supervising - jointly with the Glasgow School of Art - work on contemporary theory and popular culture.

Willy Maley was co-founder, with Philip Hobsbaum, of Glasgow’s prestigious Creative Writing Masters. He has published on a number of modern Irish and Scottish writers, including Joyce, Yeats, Roddy Doyle, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. He edited, with Michael Gardiner, The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2010). He has also worked on a wide range of modern theorists, including Derrida, Fanon, Foucault, Lyotard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks, and Cornel West. He edited, with Alex Benchimol, Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2007). His interest in postcolonialism – heco-edited the Longman Critical Reader on Postcolonial Criticism (1997) – underpins the course in African Modernities focusing on the novel, including authors such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Willy has lectured on the Beat Poets and African American Cultural Criticism, and has supervised students on a range of modern topics including film adaptation, travel writing, and contemporary fiction. Recent supervision in the period includes four AHRC-funded students and a recipient of a Carnegie award, with subjects ranging from Alasdair Gray and Empire to the short stories of Stephen King.

Rob Maslen’s interest is in modern fantasy in all its manifestations, from science fiction to magic realism, from secondary world fantasy to the New Weird, and in forms ranging from novels, short stories, poetry and plays to film and the graphic novel.  He has written on Ursula Le Guin, Mervyn Peake, Clemence Dane, Flann O’Brien, C. S. Lewis, H. G. Wells and Goro Miyazaki, and has edited the Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake for Carcanet.  He is working on a long-term project entitled A Fantastic History of the Twentieth Century, which may or may not be ready before the end of the twenty-first.  

Gavin Miller’s literary research interests include contemporary fiction, literary theory (particularly psychoanalysis), science fiction, and Scottish literature. Authors he has published on include Alasdair Gray, Kurt Vonnegut, Iain (M.) Banks, and Octavia Butler. He has written on theoretical topics for journals such as New Literary History and Philosophy and Literature, and is currently writing a monograph, Science Fiction and Psychology, for Liverpool University Press. He is also an interdisciplinary researcher in the medical humanities, particularly in the cultural history and contemporary relevance of the so-called ‘psy-disciplines’ in a Scottish and British context – a programme of research for which the work of R.D. Laing has proved particularly fruitful. As a further part of his interest in the history and culture of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, he has written on the overlap of these fields with both Christian and New Age discourses and practices for journals such as Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, History of the Human Sciences, and History of Psychiatry.

Bryony Randall’s primary research interests lie in modernist literature, particularly the early modernist period. She has specific interests in: theories of the everyday; literary theory (particularly feminist and materialist approaches); women’s writing, in particular the New Woman; literature and work; literature and time; and the relationships between literature and psychology, philosophy and sociology. Her first book, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life is published by Cambridge University Press, and her other publications include articles on Imagist poetry, Gertrude Stein, the New Woman writer George Egerton, Stevie Smith, and H.D. She is the treasurer of the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, is on the steering group of the British Association of Modernist Studies and the editorial board of the journal Pilgrimage: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies. She is currently working on a second major project provisionally entitled The Working Woman Writer 1880-1920, exploring the relationships between work, writing and gender in the early modernist period.

Alan Riach is Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University and was President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2006-10. He is the general editor of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid (Carcanet), the author of Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and co-author with Alexander Moffat of Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2009). His fifth book of poems, Homecoming (2009), follows Clearances (2001), First & Last Songs (1995), An Open Return (1991) and This Folding Map (1990). His radio series ‘The Good of the Arts’ was first broadcast in New Zealand in 2001. He has contributed chapters, essays and poems to many books and journals, most recently to the Edinburgh Companions to Contemporary Scottish poetry, to Hugh MacDiarmid, and to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, which he co-edited with Ian Brown.

Helen Stoddart works on twenty and twenty-first century literature and film and is particularly interested in questions of gender, the body and representation. She has a longstanding interest in the culture, history and representation of the modern circus and has written a monongraph, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (2000), on the subject as well as series of articles and book chapters (on Charles Dickens, Wim Wenders and Federico Fellini). She has also written the Routledge Guide to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (2007) and is currently working on a project looking at the articulation of falling and flying bodies in the work of both Angela Carter and Ali Smith. This is part of a larger investigation of articulations of flight and gravity (of movement and spirit) in twentieth century art and literature that includes work on early cinema and cinematic representations of performing female bodies (in Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes and Max Ophuls’s Lola Montès). She is also currently engaged in a study of the role of literary narratives in the work of Paula Rego.