Archival Crossings
Co-hosted by M & E SIG and the Modernist Studies in Asia Network
Friday, Oct. 30, 2026: 7 am Seattle, 10 am New York, 10 pm Hong Kong, 1 am (11/1) Sydney/Melbourne
Tsung-Han Tsai (National Cheng Kung University) – on Taiwan’s archive of 1920s Japanese edition of Dorothy Richards
Boriana Alexandrova (York University) – on Claude Cahun and what it means to do archival work on destroyed records
Angela Acosta (University of South Carolina) – on Madrid’s Velintonia and the artist-house as an archive
Mark Byron (University of Sydney) – on Pound’s interest in the Frobenius Institute’s study of Wanjina and Gwion Gwion Indigenous rock art, the written and the living archive
Holly Nelson (University of Michigan) – on Josephine Baker’s co-authored novella My Blood in Your Veins (1931) in the Parisian archives
This roundtable invites scholars who are working on small, extra-institutional, and otherwise lesser-known archives in transnational contexts to share their work in progress. We ask participants to expand the geographies of the modernist archive by giving a short presentation on what you're finding and what connections you’re making in your research. From birth records at local parishes to cartographic remainders and timetables, from employee manuals to family letters, from public monuments to everyday objects and spaces, from understudied primary sources to sheer ephemera – what are the things and texts that convey how modernist ideas and aesthetics circulated and established themselves around the world? How do you translate? What are you doing with the documents or other materials – working to digitize them, researching the context, writing up a curatorial note?