Kristin Bluemel, Ph.D., interim associate dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, professor of English, and Wayne D. McMurray and Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities, published a special issue on “Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures” in the British journal, “Modernist Cultures.”
As guest editor, she proposed the issue, acquired the contents, contributed a peer-reviewed article, wrote the issue introduction, and brought the issue through production into publication. Her article was titled “Spades and Gravers: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz and the Radical Countryside,” and focused on the Depression-era writings of Socialist gardener and artist, Clare Leighton, and her literary relations with her Communist publisher, Victor Gollancz.
Other articles that Bluemel featured in the issue included a medical historian’s look at multispecies encounters in 1920s TB sanatoria in rural Wales, an art historian’s study of art patronage in 1920s rural Northumberland, and a literary scholar’s look at the rural-industrial wartime poetry of Cumbrian noncombatant Norman Nicholson. The issue grew out of a Leverhulme Symposium on the same rural topic that Bluemel led at Newcastle University while serving there as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in 2022.
“Modernist Cultures” is the journal of the British Association for Modernist Studies. It aims to open up the field of modernist studies to new kinds of inquiry by supporting scholars’ interdisciplinary approaches to the literature, art, culture, and contexts of modernism and modernity. It is published four times a year by Edinburgh University Press.