Claire Battershill | Modernism / Modernity Print+

Claire Battershill is a Government of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University and the 2017 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Impact Award winner in the Talent Category. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Circus (Random House Canada, 2014), two collaboratively-authored academic books, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities (Palgrave, 2017), and a monograph on the biographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Modernist Lives (Bloomsbury, 2017).

She is a collaborator on the Modernist Archives and Publishing Project, which tweets from @MAPP_Project.

Contributions

Collaborative Modernisms, Digital Humanities, and Feminist Practice

Nancy Cunard began printing alone in 1927—in a heat wave no less, as she notes in her posthumously published memoir, These Were the Hours (1969)—and struggled her way through the difficult early stages of learning how to make serviceable prints on an Albion press.[1] She quickly realized, however, that she would need help if the Hours Press were ever to become a successful small publishing house. In 1928, she therefore initiated her well-known collaboration with her lover, the jazz musician Henry Crowder, turning the printing room into a space where, as Jeremy Braddock has recently argued, “Cunard’s advocacy of radical race politics” was often perceived by others as working “in concert with the open publicizing of her own romantic relationships with black men.”[2]