The George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland is not accessible from the street; one must traverse two anterooms before entering into that magnificent, public library. It is in one of these anterooms—a very large open room with wooden floors and tall windows open to the street—that the Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing exhibition was held from September 22, 2024 through March 2, 2025 at Johns Hopkins University. With material drawn from archives across Johns Hopkins’s...

In March of 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown, we—then-undergraduate Marissa Stinson and her Rider University professor Laurel Harris—visited the Special Collections at Princeton University’s Firestone Library to sift through boxes of Sylvia Beach’s papers . Rider is a fifteen-minute car ride down Route 206 from Beach’s hometown of Princeton. The accessibility of Beach’s and the Shakespeare and Company’s archives offered us a local connection to James Joyce’s iconic Irish modernist novel Ulysses (1922). Unsure of what we would find, we wound up spending the day particularly focused on Box 49, which includes a series of letters from around the world sent to Joyce in care of Beach in the 1920s and 1930s.

Although I have been living alone for a few years, I still remember having roommates and how communal living shapes domestic space and the rhythms of daily life. I remember how thin walls, bleary mornings, and long evenings in shared kitchens and living rooms inevitably lead you to learn more about your cohabitants than you’d perhaps like, the mutual exposure to daily patterns of work and leisure, mood shifts, and the vicissitudes of bodies creating an intimacy that emerges from the slow...

In the introduction to her 500-page unpublished manuscript, A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror, held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the writer, teacher, astrologer, farmer, and herbalist Silvia Dobson recounts her first correspondence with H.D. in 1933—a “rapturous” fan letter sent to a poet whom she did not know was “a man or a woman? Alive or dead?”

When Alice Oswald delivered her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023, she (once again) made new the modernist manifesto. Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry) launches the futurists on a rocket ship back to Homer via stanzas containing questions about how we come to sense each other in a vortex, since “after all humans are dark inland pools full of anguish and panic-stricken love.” As an orientation, poetry becomes an “architecture of profusion,” multiplying and mobilizing...

As Janine Utell writes of her experience in the opening post of this forum, reader reports can helpfully push our work forward towards publication. But she also points out that they can (perhaps unintentionally) dismantle our attempts to draw attention to what is excluded from conventional scholarly inquiry. I, too, recently was struck by a particularly provocative comment on an article I submitted on the writer Katherine Mansfield, and similarly have now come to realize that traditional...

Personal writing is having a moment. The recent attention to autotheory has enlivened longstanding debates about the politics of the personal as a critical scholarly mode, opening out new lines of inquiry into genre, method, and argument specifically around minoritarian aesthetics and the potential of scholarly work to elaborate forms of social justice. [1] Across what Robyn Wiegman has called “identity knowledges,” the institutionalized fields of study that focus on gender, race, ethnicity...

Over the last decade, #MeToo and the work of activists like Tarana Burke have brought attention to tacitly permitted sexual exploitation on university campuses and in work environments both on and off the clock. As #MeToo transformed the world around me, rumors I had come across in my scholarship regarding a poet laureate from nearly two centuries ago took on new significance. The rumors hinted at coercion and violation experienced by young women who found themselves in the company of Alfred...

Archival research in the 1990s involved #2 pencils and handwritten transcriptions, later painstakingly typed into a desktop computer. The archival research I undertook then as a grad student was a labor of love, a “passion project” in the spirit of Melanie Micir’s phrase for feminist modernist recovery work. Copying over (twice!) the letters and diaries of modernists like Djuna Barnes or Jean Rhys engraved their words deep in my memory. While researching early draft versions of Barnes’s...

Amy Lowell is tired. “This is a work, this poetry,” she writes Harriet Monroe in March of 1922, finalizing the poems she’ll have included in the 1922 version of Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s The New Poetry anthology. Lowell had published her eighth and ninth books the previous year, and would publish her tenth in ten years later that fall. She has pulled back on the rigorous lecturing schedule which has kept her away from her home in Brookline, Massachusetts and has had her crisscrossing the country the past several years.

In overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has rejected the notion that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, opening the door to states’ policing of the bodies of women and others who can become pregnant. While it has been widely noted that the rolling back of reproductive rights will affect Black and Brown women disproportionately, less attention has been paid to what this means for their experience of privacy. As some scholars have suggested, privacy feels definitionally impossible for women of color, insofar as racial visibility in public spaces leads often to surveillance and harm.

In 1990, when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick declared the closet “the defining structure for gay oppression in this century,” she followed that claim with a reference to the legal discourses of privacy, specifically those concentrated around the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the existence of anti-sodomy laws. As she describes them, the conversations following this case zoomed in on “the image of the bedroom invaded by policemen,” implicitly affirming that queerness belongs behind closed doors, while policemen belong in the street.

Bristling. I don’t use this word much, and I definitely do not see it on the page often. Maybe that is why it stood out to me when Carrie Rohman (whose post you can read here) employed it in her keynote at the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in June 2021. It seemed offhand but managed to strike me as significant. Carrie was saying something about how we—women, I think, in the context of her talk, but let’s circle back to this we later—bristle when we encounter familiar but nonetheless distressing articulations of sexism and misogyny in our places of work.

Erica Delsandro’s galvanizing post about the possibilities and limitations of collective feminist bristling helps signal to us all just how much work, and how much care-ful work, needs to be done around issues of gendered disadvantage, and other forms of institutionalized abuse, in our profession. I want to deliberately evoke the tradition of feminist care ethics at the outset of this discussion, in part because my recent scholarly attentions to gendered experiences of ill-treatment and disadvantage in academia may seem a strange departure from my long-standing commitments in animal studies and performance studies.

When I was in the process of proposing and developing the volume that became Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English, one of my peer reviewers noted an orientation towards the celebratory, a somewhat uncritical extolling of the vibrancy of modernist women’s writing. I had found such vibrancy in communities of modernist scholars as I was working on the volume, roundtables and seminars at the annual MSA conference, including one convened in honor of Jane Marcus shortly after her death. The...