Communal Modernisms ― Teaching Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom

Drawing from recent research that seeks to expand our understanding of modernism, Communal Modernisms offers practical pedagogical approaches for teaching modernist literature and culture. This collection, one of the first in modernism studies to integrate original scholarship with pedagogical praxis, explores multiple representations of modernist community including writers' engagement with visual media, modernist print culture as a community, and connections between writers and scientific and psychological discourses within a larger intellectual community. Building from this concept of 'communal modernisms', the included essays present methods for developing archival and interdisciplinary projects to collaboratively construct new knowledge within the undergraduate classroom. Communal Modernisms enables students to actively learn about modernism and, in the process, to better understand the early-twentieth-century world that informs their early-twenty-first-century present.

Emily M. Hinnov is an Assistant Dean of Curriculum in Undergraduate Studies at Granite State College, USA. She is the author of Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years (2009). She has taught literary modernism, composition, gender studies, film studies, world literature, and British literature from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, and she has published on Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston and James Van Der Zee, Tina Modotti, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lauren Rosenblum, a PhD candidate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, also holds an MA from New York University. Her dissertation 'Smart Ladies Sit Still: Photographs and Frames in Modernist Literature' examines the connections between technology, visual culture, and literary modernism. Her work has appeared in graduate journals and she has presented papers and organized related panels at conferences across the United States, including for the Modernist Studies Association and the Modern Language Association.

Laurel Harris is an Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, USA. Her research interests include intersections between film and literary modernism as well as writing pedagogies and the value of interdisciplinary studies. Her publications include articles on Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, and 1930s documentary cinema.