Navigating the Avant-Garde:
Interview and Creative Workshop
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde documents Loy’s avant-garde affiliations, pursuing new modes of textual and visual expression in order to invite a closer, more informed engagement with her work.
Creative Session
As part of the keynote, we wanted to think about how the Navigating the Avant-Garde Project invites us to generate, collaborate, and share ideas about Loy’s work. We led a collage workshop – first generating keywords, before putting images to them – in honour of the en dehors garde flashmob held in 2018. Collage as a method helps us draw connections, to map ideas on top and against one another, and to build a picture together. Below, you can see the results of the three rooms:
‘critique/theory/historicising’
‘locating/mapping/place’
‘crafting/medium/collaboration’
Bios
LINDA KINNAHAN is Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She is editor of the Cambridge History of 20th Century American Women’s Poetry (2016), and the author of Mina Loy, Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets (Routledge 2017). She has published on modernist and contemporary poetry, including Poetics of the Feminine: Literary Tradition and Authority in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge UP 1994) and Lyric Interventions: Feminist Experimental Poetry and Contemporary Social Discourse (Iowa UP 2004). She is co-author of the digital humanities project Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde and the digital book Mina Loy: Scholarly Book for Digital Travelers. Her forthcoming monograph is Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore.
SUZANNE W. CHURCHILL is Professor of English at Davidson College. She is the author of The Little Magazine Others & the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Ashgate 2006); co-editor, with Adam McKible, of Little Magazines & Modernism: new approaches (Ashgate 2007); and author and illustrator of the children’s book Dinosaurs Drive Firetrucks (Britt Stadig Studio 2018). She has published on modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and on periodicals, poetry, and pedagogy in various journals and collections. Founder and editor of the website, Index of Modernist Magazines (modernistmagazines.org), she is co-creator of the award-winning, open-access, online scholarly book, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (mina-loy.com).
SUSAN ROSENBAUM is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, modernism, and poetry/poetics, and co-directs the Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop. She is the author of Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (UVA 2007), and with Linda Kinnahan and Suzanne Churchill, co-author of the website and digital scholarly book Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (2019), supported by a 2017-19 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. She is currently co-curating an exhibition and catalog of Elizabeth Bishop’s Picture Postcards (opening at Vassar College in September 2023), and has long been at work on a book Imaginary Museums: Surrealism, American Poetry, and the Visual Arts, 1920-1970. Her essays have appeared in Humanities, Dada/Surrealism, Genre, Journal of Modern Literature, and Studies in Romanticism.
Loy Symposium 2023 