Stephen J. Ross is an assistant professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor with Alys Moody of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Stephen J. Ross
Contributions
On Global Modernism and Academic Precarity: A Reply to Claire Barber-Stetson
In the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on “Modernism’s Contemporary Affects,” Claire Barber-Stetson writes probingly of the relationship between the precarious existence of graduate students and early career academics in English and the rise of global modernism. She sees the expansion of modernist studies, of which global modernism is perhaps the signal instance, as “driven—at least in part—by more pervasive precarity in literary studies as a profession,” and worries about the various challenges it poses to modernism as practiced in English departments. “It threatens,” she writes, “to dilute the term modernism beyond critical purchase, to leave graduate students without sufficient institutional support, and to divert resources from other fields, periods, and movements, including contemporary literary studies.”