Centre for Modernist Studies

Description

The Centre for Modernist Studies has, since its inception, been dedicated to exploring the histories and legacies of the most challenging social, political, and aesthetic questions raised by the explosion of literary and artistic activity at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is an interdisciplinary Centre, and it seeks to encourage conversations between researchers working on a wide range of modern art forms and discourses: literature, psychoanalysis, the visual arts, music, film and architecture.

It supports conversations, conferences, talks, readings, exhibitions and other activities relating to the diverse practices and movements that have been associated with the term ‘modernism’. One's understanding of modernism (or ‘modernisms’) is capacious, and the centre's members include within their interest the histories and legacies of Aestheticism, Decadence, Vorticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. While members began within the School of English, the centre is interdisciplinary, exploring connections between literature, art, design, craft, architecture, film, performance and music.

Over the past few years researchers at the Centre have sought to provide a space for exploring modernism’s cultural politics. In particular, members have been surveying modernist attempts to think about how the arts might reshape society; they aim both to historicise and to critique the often grandiose aims of modernism, while at the same time exploring what modernist enquiry brings to contemporary imaginings of reality and the future.

Members wish to understand better how the study of modernism might respond to global crises: climate emergency, racism, populism, enduring patriarchal systems, and the widening gap between the rich and poor. Members also want to attend to the acute anxieties modernists often articulated about their own practices, their engagement with failure and loss, and their willingness to reflect, critique their own practice, and start again.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2003

Contact details

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University affiliation(s)

University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton
BN1 9RH

Partner Infrastructures

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University Of Sussex
Sussex House
Southern Ring Road, Falmer
Brighton
BN1 9RH
United Kingdom