Our research reflects our interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary writing. Our publications reflect our interdisciplinary approaches to researching modern and contemporary writing: its practice, history, performance, reception and theorization.
Some very recent publications from writers involved in the Centre include Nicky Marsh’s Credit Culture: The Politics of Money in the American Novel of the 1970s (2020), Kevin Brazil’s Art, History, and Postwar Fiction (2018), Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (2018), Devorah Baum’s Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just about Anyone) (2017), Peter Middleton’s Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War (2015), William May’s All the Poems - Stevie Smith (2014), and Stephen Morton’s States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and the Law (2013).
Our academics work closely with our creative writers, whose recent works for stage, screen and page include Philip Hoare’s RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (2017), Devorah Baum’s The New Man (with Josh Appiganesi), Rebecca Smith’s The Jane Austen Writer’s Club (2016), Carole Burns’, The Missing Woman & Other Stories (2015). Rebecca Smith’s latest book, The Ash Museum, will be out from Bloomsbury in May 2021.
Many staff members also maintain creative practices or work in collaboration with visual artists, musicians and other creative practitioners. We co-curate festivals and live performances, contribute to art exhibitions and perform our writing live.
All of our individual publications are listed under CMCW staff pages.
Staff at the Centre have also been involved in several large externally funded projects:
Invisible Mentors: British Poetry in Partnership, 1960-2020 is an AHRC Leadership Fellowship Project, led by Dr Will May. This project will uncover the history of mentoring in British poetry since 1960, chronicling its development alongside the growth of creative writing courses in HEIs, the informal networks of independent poetry presses, and schemes supported by literary festivals, publishers, and arts organisations. It will use the insights of cultural, literary and archival history to address recommendations and reports from the creative industries, and economic and structural critiques of the sector. It will contend that mentoring’s hidden history has not only shaped our notions of authorship, creative practice, and the professional artist, but our expectations of the institutions and funders that support them. This project is being pursued in collaboration with Artful Scribe and Winchester Poetry Festival.
Voices in the Gallery is an AHRC Innovation Leadership Fellowship project, led by Dr Sarah Hayden, working in partnership with John Hansard Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary to explore voiceover and voiced writing in contemporary art.
History of Financial Advice is a three-year AHRC-funded project that is writing the first comprehensive history of the genre of personal financial advice. The team includes economists, historians and literary critics as well as partnerships with a financial think tank, a financial library and the key providers of financial literacy education in the UK.
Calling the Shots is a four-year, AHRC-funded research project that investigates what is distinctive about the work of women in British cinema and what obstacles women face in the industry. Working with project partners including the BFI, Women in Film and Television UK, BECTU, Birds Eye View, and Harbour Lights Cinema, the project team are conducting primary research through a detailed statistical analysis of British films from 2000-2015, and conducting interviews with 50 women in six key filmmaking roles.
In 2014 the Centre supported the AHRC and Arts Council funded exhibition Show Me the Money: the Image of Finance from 1700 to the present when it toured to the John Hansard Gallery and Chawton House Library. The Centre was involved with the events accompanying the exhibition when it was in Hampshire, including a two-day event, The Image of Finance: Why Jane Austen on the £10 Note Matters, a public talk by activist Caroline Criado-Perez, an artist’s evening on the subject of ‘Shadow Money’ and a Poetry symposium JHG3.
In 2012, Beyond the Gene, an AHRC-funded project led by Professor Clare Hanson, held a workshop and public event at the Linnaean Society headquarters in London, at which Tim Spector, Evelyn Fox Keller and Jeannette Winterson gave talks. Beyond the Gene is the result of a collaboration between English and researchers in the Faculty of Medicine.
Between 2007 and 2010 Caroline Bergvall joined us as an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Creative Writing Fellow. Her project was entitled Writing in Tongues: Multi-Media and Poetic Projects and led to exhibitions at the Arnolfini in Bristol and the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, as well as a volume of poetry.