Call for Papers: Modernist Cosmopolitanism

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2025
Conference Date: MSA 2025 Boston October 9-12
Organized by: Adriana Fischetti, CCNY, 2nd year graduate student

Modernism has long been associated with transnational exchanges, migratory identities, and an engagement with global cultures. The modernist period witnessed an unprecedented interplay between local traditions and global influences, as writers, artists, and intellectuals navigated new cultural landscapes shaped by colonialism, war, exile, and technological advancement.

This call for papers seeks to explore the concept of modernist cosmopolitanisms and the ways in which modernist literature and culture embrace, critique, or reimagine cosmopolitan identity. I welcome contributions that interrogate the tensions between nationalism and transnationalism, the impact of imperial and colonial histories on cosmopolitan thought, and the role of modernist aesthetics in shaping global consciousness.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Literary modernism and transnational networks of influence

• Cosmopolitanism in the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others

• The role of exile, displacement, and migration in shaping modernist literature

• Colonialism, postcolonial responses, and the problematics of cosmopolitan modernism

• Print culture, little magazines, and the dissemination of cosmopolitan modernisms

• Cosmopolitan aesthetics: multilingualism, hybridity, and formal experimentation

• Race, class, and gender in modernist engagements with the global

• Urban modernisms: cities as sites of cosmopolitan encounter

• Theoretical interventions.

• Late modernist and contemporary resonances of cosmopolitanism

Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts (250-300 words) along with a brief bio (100 words or less) should be sent to afischetti@sfsu.edu by April 1, 2025. This will be for a panel at MSA Boston.  3-4 participants will present their papers on the subject.

Scholars at all career stages, including graduate students and independent researchers are welcome.