I see Professing Creative Writing as a logical extension of my work on twentieth-century publishing houses. My focus has always been on literary institutions, and all my research has been based on archival work. For the new project, I plan to explore under-studied archives at the University of Iowa, Indiana University and many others. I also want to conduct oral history interviews with key figures associated with creative writing programmes.
I continue to be keenly interested in publishing houses, particularly those that made modernist literature available to a wide audience:
(1) My monograph on the Modern Library series is going to be published in the coming months by Pickering & Chatto.
(2) I am also working on my project Cheap Modernism: European Publisher's Series and the Avant Garde. I have already written three chapters (on T. S. Eliot’s and Virginia Woolf’s involvement with the Oxford World’s Classics, on Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr in the Phoenix Library series, and on James Joyce’s and D. H. Lawrence’s association with the Travellers’ Library and the New Adelphi Library).
The first essay will be published as a book chapter in Nicola Wilson’s edited collection, The Book World: Selling and Distributing Literature, 1900-1940. The second essay has been awarded the 2014 Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust, and will be published in the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.