Saikat Majumdar - The Critic as Amateur

The Critic
as Amateur

The Critic
as Amateur

Edited by Saikat Majumdar
and Aarthi Vadde

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor at the University of York, UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His many books range from literary theory to South African writing, James Joyce, and poetic form. The most recent is The Experience of Poetry: From Homers Listeners to Shakespeares Readers (2019). He has taught in England, Scotland, and the United States.

Emily Bloom is Associate Director of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in late modernism with a focus on the interrelations between media institutions and transnational literary networks. Her book, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 19311968 (2016), was awarded the Modernist Studies Associations First Book Prize.

Rosinka Chaudhuri is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She was also the first Mellon Professor of the Global South at the University of Oxford, 201718. She has written Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal (2002), Freedom and Beef Steaks (2012), and The Literary Thing (2013) and edited Derozio, Poet of India (2008), The Indian Postcolonial (co-edited, 2010), A History of Indian Poetry in English (2016), and An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (2018). She has also translated and introduced Rabindranath Tagore: Letters from a Young Poet (2014).

Christopher Hilliard is Professor of History at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on literature and literary criticism in popular intellectual life. His recent work, on freedom of expression and crimes involving the written word, has taken him into legal history and social history. He is the author, most recently, of The Littlehampton Libels (2017) and English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement (2012). Other books include The Bookmens Dominion (2006) and To Exercise Our Talents (2006).

Tom Lutz is the founding editor and publisher of Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author most recently of And the Monkey Learned Nothing (2016) and Drinking Mares Milk on the Roof of the World (2016), two collections of anecdotes from a life of obsessive travel. His other books include Doing Nothing (2006), Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004), Crying (1999), American Nervousness, 1903 (1991), and the forthcoming Born Slippy: A Novel (2020).

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, and the author of three novels, including The Scent of God (2019), and The Firebird (2015; published in the United States as Play House, 2017), one of Telegraphs Best Books and a finalist for the Bangalore Literature Festival Best Fiction Award in 2015, and for the Mumbai Film Festival Word-to-Screen Market in 2016. He has also published a general nonfiction title, College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), on liberal arts education in India, and a monograph on global modernism, Prose of the World (2013), a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Award in 2014.

Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hughs College. He writes on literature, the modern state, and the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions, and publishing; multilingualism, translation, and interculturality; and the promise of creative criticism. His publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 18801914 (1997); Making Meaning, co-edited with Michael Suarez (2002); The Literature Police (2009); and Artefacts of Writing (2017). He is currently part of a research team working on PEN and the freedom of expression.

Melanie Micir is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches courses on modern and contemporary British literature and gender and sexuality studies. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in MLQ, JML, Modernism/modernity, and several edited collections. Her first book, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Zlatina Nikolova recently completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her PhD focused on the stylistic and thematic features of the autobiographical prose and film criticism of the modernist author Bryher. She has presented papers on the parallels between Bryhers and H.D.s autobiographical prose, on stereotypes of femininity in Bryhers Two Selves, the female experience of the Great War, and on the parallels between Sergei Eisensteins film theories and women characters in Borderline. Her research interests include the writing produced by the POOL Group, early film culture, and womens autobiographical writing.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where she works on contemporary South Asian Anglophone and Asian/American literatures and cultural theory. She has also taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, and at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in Rhetoric in 2016. An award-winning journalist and former magazine editor, she contributes essays and reviews to international scholarly, public, and semi-public outlets. Visit www.raginitharoorsrinivasan.com.

Chris Townsend is Professor of the History of Avant-Garde Film in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Department Chair. He specializes in the relationships between film, writing and painting in high modernism. Recent work includes a study of Duncan Grants Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting as part of a digital project with Tate Britain. A study of the membership of POOL Group will appear in a special issue of Papers on Language and Literature in 2019. He is working on a book about the relationship of the inter-war modernist avant-garde and new media industries.

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Her research focuses on the relationship of literature and media to globalization. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 19142016 (2016), winner of the American Comparative Literature Associations 2018 Harry Levin Prize. A special forum on the book was convened in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. She has also published numerous articles in such venues as Comparative Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, New Literary History, NOVEL, and Public Books.

Mimi Winick is Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is at work on a monograph provisionally titled Fantastic Scholarship. Her research concerns the intersections of the history of the humanities, new religious movements, and imaginative prose in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Her essays have appeared in journals including Nineteenth-Century Literature and Modernism/Modernity.

Kara Wittman is Assistant Professor of English and Director of College Writing at Pomona College. She works on the philosophical experience of wonder in literature, rhetoric, and pedagogy and has also published on small forms of communication: small talk, phatic speech, marginalia.