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):
Kenkyūsha's Modern English Series: Dorothy Richardson in Taiwan
Boriana Alexandrova (York University):
Translation as Archival Method: Assembling the Archival Remnants of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore's Post-1937 Writings
Angela Acosta (University of South Carolina):
Madrid's House of Poetry: Velintonia and the Artist-House as an Archive
Davide Crosara (Universita Pegaso, Naples):
Writing the Visual: Intermedial connections between painter Gastone Noveli and Samuel Beckett in the Novelli Archives
Mark Byron (University of Sydney):
On Ezra Pound’s interest in the Frobenius Institute’s study of Wanjina and Gwion Gwion Indigenous rock art: the written and the living archive
Molly Porter (University of Washington):
On assembling an archive of Black Elk fragments sourced from interpretive infrastructure across Indigenous and U.S. public lands
Ruth Clemens (Leiden University):
On experimental methods required to engage with materials such as avant-garde piano rolls in the small, chaotic, independent Pianola Museum in Amsterdam
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?