Modern and Contemporary

The Modern and Contemporary research group focuses on literature and culture from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st. As well as having strong connections to the Romantic and Victorian and Creative Writing research groups in the school, the group's wide-ranging expertise has particular strengths in the areas of:

• Modernism, including Virginia Woolf
• women's writing and gender studies
• crime fiction
• contemporary critical theory
• modern and contemporary poetry
• British and American theatre
• Scottish literature
• war writing; literature of the 1940s
• British cinema and music.

Awards

The group and its members have recently attracted funding from AHRC, the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust, the Hosking Houses Trust, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh for projects including:

• The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf
• 'Developing the Douglas Dunn Archive' (held within University Collections, University of St Andrews Library)
• 'War, Postwar and "Peace": A literary history of the 1940s'
• 'The Unfinished: The Life and Work of V.R. "Bunny" Lang'
• 'The Collected Works of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair'

Postgraduate community

The group is home to a thriving postgraduate community, with staff and students involved in the organisation of conferences both within the University and in collaboration with other institutions. Postgraduates in the school are encouraged to organise research events, for which there is dedicated funding available.

Recent events include a conference on 'Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition', a conference on representations of waste in post-1945 literature, a workshop on War and the Emotions, a crime fiction masterclass, the interdisciplinary 'Sexualities In and Out of Time' conference, conferences dedicated to the work of David Mitchell, Maggie Gee, T. S. Eliot and E.M. Forster's Maurice (with the associated publication Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster’s Maurice in 2020), a seminar on the Opera and the novel, the Food for Thought reading group, and the Forum for Modern Language Studies Colloquium.

Recent PhD projects include:

• Paul Malgrati's digital project on Joe Corrie

Research Projects

The group is home to a number of significant research projects and its members are also actively involved in a range of networks and collaborative ventures.

• WAR-Net - Professor Gill Plain is the co-founder and coordinator of WAR-Net, an interdisciplinary, transhistorical network for scholars working on any aspect of war and representation.
• Commemorative Cultures – Dr Kristen Treen established the Commemorative Cultures project to document diverse forms of commemorative expression relating to the American Civil War.

Publications

Book editions and series based in the school include the following:

• Refugee Tales – This series of tales, modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and co-edited by Professor David Herd, communicates the experiences of those who sought asylum in the UK and have found themselves detained in this country. This is part of the AHRC funded project on Archives of Solidarity.
• Professor Emerita Susan Sellers and Prof Emma Sutton are involved the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, a massive undertaking that presents the most authoritative, most fully collated and annotated texts of Woolf's works available to scholars to date.
• Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press), edited by Professor Gill Plain
• Edinburgh Critical Studies in War and Culture (Edinburgh University Press), edited by Prof Kate McLoughlin (Oxford) and Professor Gill Plain
• The Feminist Library: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Edinburgh University Press), edited by Dr Jackie Jones, Prof Alison Light and Professor Gill Plain