I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston.
MSA 2025 felt busy and lively, with many panels I wanted to see and workshops I wished I could have joined. My own main presentation at the conference was a talk on Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the making of Fire!!; I posted the slides publicly here. I also did a short position paper related to African American literature beyond Harlem for a workshop organized by Adam McKible; most of my claims came out of my datasets at African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology, which can be found here.
Below, I'll just give brief accounts of some things I saw and enjoyed, without saying too much about the actual findings of the research by the scholars who gave the talks. I won't try to cover everything I saw, in part because it would lead to a post that would be really, really long. I'm also trying to be sensitive to the research as presented -- much of which is not yet published. (So instead of saying what speaker X said, I'll say, they were looking at this text.)
Remembering Sejal Sutaria:
To start, the emotional heart of the conference for me was the panel "Writing in Community: Thinking Alongside Sejal Sutaria in Memoriam." As some readers may know, the scholar Sejal Sutaria recently passed away, and three of her close friends in academia (Ria Bannerjee, Casey Andrews, and J. Ashley Foster) organized a panel to commemorate her and discuss aspects of her published and unpublished work. I won't say too much about the specific papers given by the speakers, because I don't have direct permission to do so. I will say, however, that I was really moved by the way they blended personal reminiscences and tributes with academic engagement. Though we weren't close, I had known Sejal for many years (our first email correspondence was back in 2006, though I believe we first met in person at MSA around 2010 or 2011. We were on a panel together at the Woolf conference in 2019, and were scheduled to be on a panel together for last year's MSA, though she ultimately had to drop out for health reasons.). Sejal was a lovely person and a thoughtful scholar; she will be missed. You can find one of her published scholarly articles on Venu Chitale here; she covers some of the same ground in this essay at the BBC website.
Also, Daniel Morse was in the audience, and he mentioned that Sejal had given a talk at his invitation at the University of Nevada-Reno four years ago, again on Venu Chitale's BBC work during World War II. The YouTube link for the talk is here.
Conventional academic panels -- a few links and highlights
The Baroness:
Natalie Barney: a "social modernist"
I also saw Sophie Yates, a Ph.D. student at UBC in Vancouver speaking about Natalie Barney, a rich American woman who lived as an expatriate in France for most of her adult life, and self-published a number of books of poetry and prose that circulated amongst a fairly small coterie. She was well-known to many other expatriates in France, including Sylvia Beach (who did not think highly of Barney's writing), and she was well known for taking many female lovers, including a British poet (who wrote in French!) named Renee Vivien. I won't say too much about Yates' readings of Barney, except to say that the works sound interesting, especially in connection with a close account of Barney's personal life.
Anticolonial Manifestos:
I also went to a panel on "The Manifesto and Anticolonial Thought." Here I was most interested in new work from Peter Kalliney, on three mid-century transnational conferences for Black writers, the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists (in Paris), the 1958 Afro-Asian Writers Conference that was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958, and the African Writers Conference that was held at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in June 1962. Kalliney was interested in the manifesto-like resolutions produced at each of these events. He cited James Baldwin's first-hand account of the third event, published in an essay called "Princes and Powers."
On the same panel, Alys Moody spoke about Aime Cesaire's often-overlooked poem, "Pour un greviste assassine" (For an assassinated striker), which you can find excerpted on JSTOR here. The poem is different from other Cesaire poetry I've read, in part because it's so direct and not especially 'surreal'.
Also on the same panel, Maru Pabon of Brown University spoke about the Francophone Algerian poet Jean Senac, who worked closely with militants against French colonialism, but who was assassinated, possibly by Islamist militants, in 1973. Senac seems like a fascinating and important figure; I was particularly intrigued by Senac's "Ode to Afro-America" (1972).
Queer and Trans Topics:
between the theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti and his mentor (really: groomer) Charles Leadbeater. Krishnamurti was brought into the Theosophical Society by Leadbeater, and declared the "world teacher," but later rebelled against it.
Chris Coffman of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks gave a paper on "Nonbinary Gender and Desire" in H.D. and Byrher. They were looking at H.D.'s "I Said" and Bryher's early collection of poetry, "Arrow Music." I found the readings of nonbinary or genderfluid frameworks of desire particularly compelling around this collection of poetry by Bryher. Bryher's 1922 collection isn't available online at all at present! Earlier, according to the U-Penn online books page, it was available at the Emory Women Writers Resource Project; now that points to a page on the Wayback Machine. One poem from the collection, "The Pool," can be found here.
At the same panel, I saw Mat Fournier of Ithaca College presenting on a fascinating trans-masc. figure named Violette Morris. Morris was a famous athlete in the 1910s who began to dress in male clothes and later had a mastectomy. She/They also got into car racing and later collaborated with the Fascist Vichy Regime. Fournier was interested in the question of whether and how Morris' strong desire to pass might have led them to embrace the most conservative mold of masculinity available at the time, which in turn led to a sympathy for fascist politics.
Queer and Trans Marianne Moore
of Harvard and Benjamin Kahan of Louisiana State University, both speaking about trans and asexual tendencies in Marianne Moore's poetry. Kahan, of course, has a chapter on Moore in his book Celibacies, and Shanosky, a graduate student was citing that in her paper. Kahan here was perhaps slightly revising (or expanding) his earlier work on Moore, with a focus on Moore's own penchant for identifying with masculine figures in fiction as well as her famous public outfit (the tricolor hat and cape). Kahan here was focusing mostly on Moore's most autobiographical final book, Tell Me Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1966).
Little Magazines in Kolkata:
I also went to a South Asian Modernism panel (one of a handful at the conference), with speakers all focused on the College Street Neighborhood in Kolkata (Calcutta). This is an area just across from several major colleges established during the colonial period, including Hindu College, Presidency College, and the University of Calcutta. Since the early 20th century, it's been a place where you can find bookseller stalls lining the street, and coffeehouses where students congregate. A graduate student at Stanford, Suchismito Khatua, spoke about the Kolkata Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, founded by Sandip Dutta in 1978. Dutta runs this center out of his family's house on Tamer Lane (just off College Street. He had the idea for it when he saw the librarians at the National Library throwing out a bag of old little magazines in the mid-1970s. Thus, an archive was born.
It seems like a really cool place, though the pictures Suchismito shared of stacks upon stacks of magazines not arranged in any appreciable order struck me as both exciting and exhausting. What's in those stacks? Who in their right mind would catalog all of it?
Keynote: Evie Shockley and Kevin Quashie talking about Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucile Clifton, Auden...
I was only able to get to one keynote event, with Evie Shockley and Kevin Quashie talking about poetry in a structured conversation (not a conventional 'talk'). They talked about Gwendolyn Broooks' "Boy Breaking Glass," Lucille Clifton's "Study the Masters," Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," as well as several poems by Shockley herself that seem to be in dialogue with some of these earlier poems.
Throughout, they were interested in how these poets deal with questions of minoritization, the legacy of race and racism, and the social function of poetry.
Along the way, they mentioned Shockley's concept of the Son-not -- a poem that looks like a sonnet, perhaps, but subtly isn't one. There's a bit more about that here.
See my notes from MSA 2024 here.