We host a range of activities and events, bringing staff, postgraduates and undergraduates together for panels, roundtables and performances.
Neomodernisms Salon | Session III: Authoritarian, Nationalist, and Populist Returns
May 7 | 15:00 to 16:30 BST | Online on Zoom
From pro-Putin cultural policy to the roaring twenties parties of MAGA, contemporary authoritarian, nationalist, and populist movements abound with returns to - or of - modernist aesthetics, figures, and ideologies. What does this mean for contemporary understandings of modernism? How is modernist heritage shaped by geopolitical forces? What is the valency of historical modernism in contemporary political economy?
The Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing (CMCW) hosted its annual symposium in April on the theme of Shortness.
Colleagues were invited to characterise the subject however they liked: being less-than vertical; demonstrating brevity and speed; behaving in a manner considered to be clipped, tart or abrupt. Presentations included readings on abbreviation, fleeting figures, flirtatious glances, decolonial sound, sculptural performance, and the brevity of fiction and play.
We closed with a panel on pathologies of writing, led by Siddharth Soni (Univ. of Southampton) and Eliza Haughton-Shaw (Univ. of Cambridge), and a keynote presentation by Kanupriya Dhingra (SOAS, Univ. of London) on the parallel booksellers of Old Delhi.
Mind Sweeps
CMCW was also honoured to feature Professor Sara Crangle (Univ. of Sussex) as part of its Mind Sweeps series focusing on decolonial world literature. You can watch a recording of the talk, titled "Fierce Intimacies: Black Avant-Gardes and Gender", below.
Workshop Series - Reframing GenAI
This interdisciplinary workshop series is funded by the English ECC and PGR Research Culture Development Fund. It is the result of collaborative efforts between the Department of English, the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing, and Digital Humanities.
The workshops are facilitated by Sam Pegg, a postgraduate researcher in the Department of English. The aim is to reframe creative-critical dialogues in research for PGRs and ECCs across the Humanities.
Split across three workshops, this series looked at two central tenets:
Recognising GenAI within Humanities Scholarship and the very real and emotional responses it evokes within research.
Exploring the implications of GenAI on criticality and creativity within Humanities scholarship.
Topics covered during these workshops included, but are not limited to:
emotional responses to GenAI
GenAI's placement within Humanities research
threats and opportunities of embedding GenAI in research
methods towards GenAI collaboration/co-creation in research
The first iteration of this series happened between May and June 2025, with plans to expand it over the coming years.
