Robert Spoo is Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. He is a recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a Princeton Law and Public Affairs Fellow. His publications include Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Modernism and the Law (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
Robert Spoo
Contributions
The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood
Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner,
Copyright and the Modernist Archive: James Joyce’s Correspondence at Antwerp
This blog post is about an institution of modernism that is quite different from the ones that Lawrence Rainey examined in his groundbreaking book, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture.
Future Pasts
This blog concerns itself with the messy, multidisciplinary spaces of the archives—both real and imagined. It brings together everyone involved in the creation of archives to discuss how these spaces shape, have shaped, and will shape the study of modernism.