In These Times

Debra Rae Cohen

Contributors

Humanities to the Rescue: A Militant Editorial Project

David R. Castillo

The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a...

Amateur Hour, or, Feminism Against TERFism

Rebecca Colesworthy

I have heard proclamations of feminism’s death many times over the years. Nevertheless, it came as a genuine surprise when I encountered it this past July, in an essay on “Sidecar,” the New Left Review blog, by NLR editor Caitlín...

Injurious Recipes: A Few Ingredients for a “Dangerous” Modernist Studies

Charles Andrews

Recently, while sifting through a long and detailed academic book contract, I found a list of items the publisher required me to exclude. A wonderful bullet point mandated that there be “no recipes or formulae or instructions” that “if followed...

It’s My Moment! Archives and Conspiracy Theories in Post-Roe America

Aimee Armande Wilson

We're all familiar with this scenario: a scholar spends years of her life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge on a relatively narrow topic, and the reward for this dogged pursuit is the esteem of colleagues and mentions in specialist...

Creative Scholarship, or Doubling Down

Lesley Wheeler

I’m sometimes told by people who work outside of universities that being a teacher-writer-editor in an English Department sounds great, and occasionally it is. Yet lately everything “great” about academia sounds ominous: the Great Resignation,...

Reading 1922, Reading 2022: Modernism, Historicism, and the Crises of Liberal World Order

Gabriel Hankins

How should modernists think about the current invasion of Ukraine, and the underlying crisis of liberal order, if at all, and what does that have to do with the crisis in historical thinking and legitimation in literary studies more generally? My...

How I Talk about Activism without Talking about Activism

Laura Hartmann-Villalta

As a scholar of modernism and the Spanish Civil War, I have long been engaged with others ’ ideas about engagement—both modernists and scholars of modernism—questioning the intersection of politics and art. As a scholar at the margins of...

The 2016 Project

Samuel Cohen

I teach American literature in the public university system of Missouri, the state whose admission to the union as a slave state caused a national crisis, the state where Dred Scott was judged to have “ no rights the white man is bound to respect...

COVID, Commemoration, and Cultural Memory

Alice Kelly

In a striking moment in Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address in January 2021, the new head of state asked the nation to join him “in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those we lost this past year to the pandemic.” This was, he told the millions...

Dispatches of a Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire

Jennie Lightweis-Goff

Is there any critical concept so abused in our political culture as “emotional labor,” a term seemingly used—like mansplain— to settle scores, to end conversation? Even now, I revise myself. Yes, “wave” language in feminism is more...

A Failure to Think Forward

Janine Utell

This is about failure: my own failure to think forward, my own failure to see the future. Perhaps this piece can provide an opportunity to reflect on what can emerge from individual failures as well as our field’s reckoning with its wider...

Reading Modernism on Election Day

Timothy Wientzen

It’s election day in the United States. So, of course, I’m thinking about modernism.

Rummaging through E. M. Forster’s Loot

Cedric Van Dijck

By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.

Grievability, COVID-19, and the Modernists’ Pandemic

Elizabeth Outka

For the past five years, I have been immersed in research on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic and the unexpected ways it weaves its way into modernism. My book on the topic came out last October, about two months before a worrisome new illness...

She Works Too Hard for the Money

Rebecca Colesworthy

Shortly after starting as an executive assistant in development at a nonprofit organization in 2012—my first nonacademic job following a three-year postdoctoral position—I joked to my new boss one night after everyone else had gone home that she...

Keyword: Pacification

Damien Keane

A couple of years ago, I published a book that worried the quantitative conception of information, by suggesting that “information” constituted a problem not because it lacked ways of being defined, but because it could be defined at once in so...

Modernism, Eco-anxiety, and the Climate Crisis

Anne Raine

When In These Times launched in early 2017, it gave voice to a collective sense of shock, a need to connect scholarship with activism and “engage, engage, engage.” Since then, contributors have offered a range of thoughtful reflections on how to...

Aesthetic Education for the Anthropocene

Thomas S. Davis

Austral summer on the Antarctic Peninsula. Eight of us climb out of our zodiac onto the shore of Petermann Island. This place dazzles and overwhelms the senses. The luminous blue icebergs, granite streaked pink with penguin guano, the weakly...

Joyce & the Dems: Ulysses, Politics, and Cultural Capital

Jonathan Goldman

“We are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries,” intones Richard Ellmann, the first words of his James Joyce, published in 1959. [1] Sixty years later, Joyce’s most famous book (and second-hardest to read) has become a talking point and prop...

Looking Backward on a Strike

Megan Faragher

When the cold January turned to an even colder February, I would have loved nothing more than to begin teaching Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as part of my class on twentieth-century utopian literature. But instead of going to class...

American Memory, Forgotten Wars

Patrick Deer

November 2018 not only sees the US midterm elections which will allow the American people to respond at the ballot box to the tumultuous and often exhaustingly toxic political environment during the Trump presidency. It also brings the less...

The Quantified Self

Lisa Mendelman

The information superhighway is paved with good intentions. This thought occurred to me earlier this summer, as I drove the Silicon Valley corridor of 101. “The first survivor of Alzheimer’s is out there,” one billboard declared. “Hello marijuana...

In Search of Lost Time: Precarious Research in the UK

Séan Richardson

On a recent episode of the Modernist Podcast , I asked “What does precarity mean to you?” My inquiry came in the wake of the strike action that swept the UK in the early months of 2018, as academics became embroiled in an all too familiar fight...

Auburn Prison and Carceral Modernity: A Performance History

Nick Fesette

Originally constructed in 1817, Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York stands as the oldest continually functional maximum-security penitentiary in the United States. [1] I doubt that its designers would have predicted that 200 years...

Sign of the Belated Times

David Farley

Modernism has always been bound up for me with travel, with politics, and with protest. I got my first passport and traveled to what was then the Soviet Union in January of 1987. It was the dead of winter and the twilight of the Cold War when we...

Modernist Memories of Fascism: Women’s Writing in the Age of Trump

Julie Vandivere

As a scholar of early-twentieth-century literature, I have not found it necessary to address contemporary political issues in my work. However, the election of Donald Trump has forced me to change my thoughts about writing in general and more...

The Limits of Resistance

Benjamin Tausig

No single word has signaled a repulsion toward Donald Trump—and the impulse to respond to him—like “resistance.” The term emerged immediately after the election, as soon as November 11th (The Advocate: “Count us as part of ‘the resistance’”),...

Modernism Ungoverned

Julie Beth Napolin

For the first time in 7 years, I am not teaching full-time. I’m on sabbatical. The morning after the election, there was no place I was supposed to be other than working on my book. I didn’t have to face a classroom and try to digest the election...

Echoes of Fascism

Kate Macdonald

In January I was teaching speculative and science fiction from the modernist period to show my students how fascism emerges, and how to recognise the ways that literary strategies can instil alienation, fear of the Other, and anti-Semitism and...

Late to the Party

Melissa Dinsman

In his insightful contribution to “In These Times,” James Gifford takes inspiration from Woolf to state that on or about November 2016 something fundamentally changed (or rather should fundamentally change) in our teaching of modernist studies....

On or About November 2016, Modernist Studies Changed

James Gifford

On November 9th, 2016, I was teaching my last class on Hemingway’s in our time . I had only one North American student in the room, and everyone was silent. It was silence of a kind that my neighbourhood, even deep in the night, never...

In These Times

Feb 2, 2017 By: Debra Rae Cohen

Volume 1, Cycle 4

In These Times is a space for our community to explore issues of social justice, teaching, and research in uncertain times. In the From the Editors section of the Print Plus platform (1.4), Debra Rae Cohen asks,

How can we insert the urgency of activism into our models of composition? We know how, if we didn’t earlier, to express this urgency as private citizens—march, volunteer, protest, get local, organize, call, write, share information, support each other, engage, engage, engage. But how do we as scholars of modernism and modernity do so? How can we come together to do so as a community?

We invite you to share your thinking in all forms—personal statements, anecdotes, syllabi, snippets of research, proposals for collaboration, exemplary lives—in a blog we’re simply calling “In These Times.” Write to Debra Rae Cohen directly at drc@sc.edu with submissions, questions, or suggestions.