Research Projects

October 2025

The current research project (second book) is in the stage of preparation.

PhD project - 2020-2024

"Little Magazine Dialogism. Constellations, Circulations, and Submersions of Modernism"

Sub-project "Constellations" within the DFG-funded research project (2020-2023) "Multiplications: Modernity, Mass Culture, Gender in the United States, 1910-1933".

Abstract:

The dissertation examines the diffusion and manifestation of literary and artistic modernism in the transatlantic region. For material, it largely relies on the so-called “little magazines” published by diverse literary movements (particularly, for this dissertation, in the United States, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and South America). The central chapters showcase and read the ways in which little magazines entered into dialogues with each other, other periodicals, and their readers. They trace how little magazines came to establish modernist forms, devices, and ways of thinking into broader practice and how these media functioned as crucial, subcultural interventions in wider, emancipatory discourses.

The dissertation also aims to newly conceptualize the literary genre of “modernism,” which has seen rapid expansion in the last two decades, by introducing the metaphor of the “constellation,” which stems from philosophical remarks by Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It attempts to recalibrate modernist research towards communicable, changeable arrangements of specific sources and situations and away from the progressive and additive recording of an archived field of material (which uses the network as its central metaphor). The constellation-model undermines a classical understanding of modernism based on artistic excellence and stylistic complexity and highlights the dissemination of modernist forms within a contemporary, participatory practice.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “dialogism,” meanwhile, functions as the backdrop of the periodical analysis. Chapters examine the collaborations and differently dialogical approaches of art movements and small magazines among themselves (“Lateral Dialogues”) and their interventions in mass-oriented modernist print media (“Asymmetric Dialogism”) with particular attention to feminist, Black and anti-racist magazines. “Amateur Modernism” then focuses on the dialogues between small magazines and their readers. 

These chapters deal with the dispersion of modernism. The chapter “Forgetful Modernism” sets a counterpoint by examining the submersion of American futurist Frances Simpson Stevens in cultural history. An emphasis on her artistic activity and her discontinuously formulated theory of a practical avant-garde shows the practice of modernism can be brought back into everyday life. The conclusion, “Practicing Modernism,” collects these considerations of a practical modernism, shows resonances with conventional conceptions of the genre, and demonstrates the advantages of a participatory idea of modernism in our own present.