Modernism and Science: Call for Papers

In an interview with Arts and Decoration magazine 1915, Marcel Duchamp praised the ‘scientific spirit’ of Seurat and Cezanne, then predicted that ‘the twentieth century is to be still more abstract, more cold, more scientific’.^[1] In this, he was presented as an ‘iconoclast’, providing a dramatic new perspective on art. Yet, a wide range of modernist writers and artists witnessed and responded to a world in which scientific innovation was impossible to ignore.

Modernist Festivities: Call for Papers

“[L]et us hide the cocktail-shaker,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in the Daily Express in 1928, for “[c]ocktails are chilly things at the best of times, and during Christmas week they are ‘all wrong.’”

Call for Papers: Black Lives Matter and Modernist Studies

Content warning: police brutality

Modernist studies has been slow to respond to urgent calls for reform within white-dominated higher education: to decolonise, to diversify, to include. 2020 has witnessed the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the shooting of Jacob Blake and so many more, which have sparked a global sense of urgency in the fight against racial injustice. Modernist studies must acknowledge and examine white modernism’s difficult history of racism, and align itself with the Black Lives Matter movement and active anti-racism work within higher education. These imperatives are not new: students, educators and activists have been calling for decolonisation, diversification and inclusion in the academy for decades.