Today, Tavi talks with Joseph Cermatori and Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen. Joseph is an associate professor of English at Skidmore College, where he focuses on performance studies, with an eye towards drama, opera, and musical theater. He studies how queer theory and the theories of aesthetics intersect with this area of performance. He'll be discussing his 2021 book, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater. Our other guest, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, is the associate director of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Emmelyn specializes in modern art, especially focusing on how histories of art, biology, and psychology intersect, and, particularly, how those studies combine with the history of sexuality. She will be talking about her 2021 book, Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition. Both Joseph and Emmelyn were finalists for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.

In our inaugural episode, Tavi talks with Philip Tsang, assistant professor at Colorado State University, where he teaches Victorian, modernist, and postcolonial literature. Philip is the author of The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in 20th Century British Literature, published in 2021 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The work focuses on Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V.S. Naipaul, and explores how literary reading can help us to understand the frustrated interplay of attachment, intimacy, and exclusion under empire.

In the Spring of 2016, I received confirmation that I had been awarded funding to undertake doctoral study that coming October. Overwhelmed, I physically jumped for joy, promptly thumping my skull on the shelf that rested shortly above me. Usually, we bang our heads due to frustration brought about by inertia, but I think about this literal knock as a transitional moment, one which allowed me to cross the battle lines drawn by my desk, seceding from the administrative camp and joining the ranks of graduate school