Blogs
Latest Blog Posts
Fitzi’s Dog: Lost Auto/biographical Presence in Nightwood
Nov 16, 2022
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 ...
“Broken Continuity”: Cubist Interpretation from Mary Butts’s Letters in the Archive
Nov 2, 2022
The past year’s global pandemic may be remembered as a time of boundaries: six foot or two-meter personal bubbles, restricted entry to and movement within public spaces, and the once-steady stream of international travellers reduced to a trickle. In many ways, this new reality further emphasized the concentrically fortified position occupied by the Special Collections archives housed in the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library. How does a department located in the basement of a locked...
Miss Lowell Regrets
Oct 12, 2022
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...
Orienting to the Private: The Spatial Dreamworlds of Black Becoming
Sep 30, 2022
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...