Clusters
Latest Clusters
Modernist Elegy and Grief’s Counterpublics
May 13, 2026
The essays gathered in this cluster discover new ways to address intractable, interconnected problems at the heart of elegy studies. We approach this field of study now with several hopes, across different horizons: with the hope of better understanding how this writing about death mobilized agency during past waves of political violence, and how it might continue to do so in the present; with the desire to further amplify conversations about modernist literature into global frameworks,...
Global Modernisms and Asia’s Other Empires
Jul 31, 2025
The aim of this cluster is to provide an alternative to the disciplinary reliance on Anglo-European imperiality as a structuring force for what is considered global within global modernisms. Collectively the cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism, and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which Europe is influential, but not the sole player. This cluster contends that some of the strongest...
Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100
Jul 2, 2025
In her editor’s note introducing the first 2022 print issue of Modernism/modernity, Anne Fernald reflects on anniversaries and new beginnings in light of this weightiest of modernist centenaries: “1922 was a special year and its advent is special to us, in part because it is an anniversary not of violence, but of artistic achievement. If we value art as a mode of resistance to violence and a way to make meaning out of loss, then anniversaries that are determined by art are important.” An...
Modernism in Comics
May 20, 2025
Modernism, as the last two decades of criticism have taught us, resides in many places. From Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the jazz of Louis Armstrong, the Dadaist oddity of Ballet M écanique to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, the expansiveness of James Joyce’s Ulysses to the lithe sophistication of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , the ubiquity of modernist experimentation in twentieth-century art exposes the porous boundary...