MSA 2024: Modernist Collectivity Roundtable

deadline for submissions: 
March 16, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Laura Hartmann-Villalta / Gabriel Hankins // JHU / Clemson U
contact email: 

This roundtable asks for new thinking about modernist collectivity: collectivity in relation to material resources, intellectual support, and aesthetic productivity in the modernist period; and collectivity as principle for sustained scholarly collaboration and resource-sharing now. 

At the MSA-sponsored MLA 2024 “After the New Modernist Studies” panel, Laura Hartmann-Villalta proposed new models for sustaining work in modernist studies as adjunctification, alternative careers, and non-tenure-track positions become the norm in the field. She proposed collective, collaborative approaches to scholarship organized around concise critical interventions; resource-sharing of materials, and databases for archival research; and more use of a multiple-author model, as in the lab sciences.

This roundtable responds to Hartmann-Villalta’s call for collaborative authorship and sustainable resource-sharing, while highlighting the ways in which such modernist collectivities are already transforming our field. We invite participants to discuss historical forms of collectivity available for reading or re-use in the archive; to present examples of scholarly collective work or mutual aid; or to propose the infrastructure – digital, institutional, scholarly resources and publications – necessary for such model(s) to be successful. 

We are interested in both examples from the modernist period and our own contemporary moment and its challenges/rewards for collectivity, and in particular invite essays that consider both in parallel, or in productive contradiction.

Please send 200-250 word abstracts to lhartm13@jhu.edu and ghankin@g.clemson.edu by March 16, 2024 with “Modernist Collectivity” in the subject line.