Rio Matchett gained her PhD in queer theory and modernist literature from the University of Liverpool in 2022, where she founded the working groups for Decolonising the Curriculum, and the Postgraduate Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She has shared her research at the British Library, Sorbonne Université Paris, and IULM Milan, alongside lecturing on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, most recently at Birkbeck University of London and the Guildhall Conservatoire. Her academic publications include a chapter on 'The Little Review' in The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (2022). Rio was shortlisted for the 2024 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, and is due to publish her first book with Harper Collins and Viking in 2026.
Rio Matchett
Contributions
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 anniversary determined not by violence, but by art: what better way to open a cluster marking the centenary of a modernist long poem dedicated to the “Peace Carnival” of Paris in 1919? Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, what Julia Briggs has irresistibly dubbed “modernism’s lost masterpiece,”