The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

As technology enables us to communicate with one another in unpredictable ways that allow for an unprecedented public exchange of diverse ideas, cultivating the philosophical habits of an engaged fallibilistic pluralism gains in urgency. The emergence of the World Wide calls us to consider how an ethics of philosophy might enable us to cultivate…[Read more]

Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) rewrites post-Second World War crises of displacement, child combat, and state re-integration through the genre of the domestic melodrama. Adolescent protagonists Barbary and Raoul move from France to London at the end of the war as both combatants and refugees, having spent the conflict aiding the R…[Read more]

This article approaches the problem of reconstructing the culturally situated audience experience of radio programming through the example of Louis MacNeice’s wartime radio broadcasts, notably “Alexander Nevsky” and “Christopher Columbus”. The article draws on audience research reports, internal correspondence, and close analysis of the broadcasts…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of the history of radio studies as it intersects with twentieth-century literary studies, and outlines recent research trends in the field. Beginning with the earliest theorists and practitioners of radio (including Hilda Matheson, Rudolf Arnheim, and Lance Sieveking), the article considers how mid-twentieth…[Read more]

Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue black and “coloured” lives, while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-whit…[Read more]

This course is intended to give students a broad introduction to (primarily) British modernist fiction in the context of the new media ecology of the early twentieth century. Other media (radio, film), genres (drama), and national traditions (Irish, American, German, Soviet) make appearances.

In this thesis, the imagery of water serves as a point of focus for an inquiry into the composition of
medieval abstract space. As a ubiquitous element of human life with distinct properties and
connotations across time, water touches, and has ever touched upon, both what is historically and
culturally unique and what is ongoing within…[Read more]