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Does empire have an expiry date?
By Philip Tsang In December 2020, BBC released a radio documentary about Dorothy Bonarjee. Born into a Bengali Christian family in India in 1894, Bonarjee was sent to London for school at the age of ten. She later enrolled in the University College of Wales...
Automatic
By Timothy Wientzen My scholarship focuses on literature of the early twentieth century, a period that scholars generally refer to as the “modernist” period. This era is so named because it was defined by the rapid and novel transformations of everyday life...
Making Liberalism New
By Ian Afflerbach Literary scholars pride ourselves on wrangling with words. We stop and isolate them, pick them apart, flip through historical records to uncover their prior meanings. I always find it interesting, then, when certain words slip out from this...
Reflections on “Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist”
I first became aware of the work of Ilia Zdanevich while searching libraries and archives to study the typography of 20th-century avant-garde Dada and Futurist poets through their manuscripts and printed ephemera. But my research on Iliazd brought me into...
Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics
Modernism’s Metronome is about poets and readers caught up in meter and unsure about their footing. When I began studying poetry in college, one of the first poems that caught my ear was a metrical tour-de-force—though I didn’t know it then— by the late modern...
The Black Skyscraper and the Urban Sensorium
On the occasion of the paperback release of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, I want to reflect on two images—one that appears on the book’s cover and one that does not feature in the book at all but is equally illustrative of its...
In Search of Russian Modernism
The disintegration of the Soviet empire brought about a Copernican revolution in Russian cultural historiography. Paradoxically, the post-Soviet documentary deluge and the collapse of the ideological coordinates hitherto guiding the writing of cultural history...