I was delighted to join Modernism/modernity as co-editor in July, and have already learned a very great deal in a very short time. One thing I have learned is that you miss out on much excitement if you don’t visit Print Plus every week. I’ve always admired the platform’s innovative format and content, but now, by exploring back through the whole archive, I have realized the full richness of what is published there and the full breadth of opportunities that it offers for debate and collaboration. Indeed, one of the clusters, from 2021, actually took the collaborative nature of modernism as its theme, bringing together perspectives from art history, music and literary studies. Celebrating the fifth anniversary of their Visualities blog last year, curators Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi note that more than fifty authors have already contributed. “Working together, including across generations and disciplines,” they write, “can allow us to think and write in ways we couldn’t otherwise.”

Two perfect examples of collaborative practice have just appeared on Print Plus. The first, Sookyoung Lee’s “Letter from the Field,”  launches a new series for the Modernism, Energy and Environment blog curated by Thomas S. Davies. The series emerges from lively conversations held at the Modernist Studies Association’s “Modernism and Environment” special interest group, aiming to open those up to the wider scholarly community. Your comments are invited: as Sookyoung writes, “we look to serve as each other’s ear, as public addressees open to personal responses.”

The second is a peer-reviewed article with six co-authors. “Virginia Woolf in Circulation: The Hogarth Press Order Books, Modernist Bookselling and Digital Praxis” is by student-staff-faculty team Alice Staveley, Victoria Ding, Emily Elott, Ekalan Hou, Khuyen Nha Le, and Peter Morgan. They transcribed the order books into spreadsheets, generating datasets that give insight into “the often invisible, but deeply networked cultures of modernist book production.” Through working so closely with the handwritten records produced by dozens of press workers, the team gained new insight into research collaboration: “the intimacy of our access to their collective, anonymous, and years-long clerical practices refracted, sometimes ambivalently, our own.”

Another aspect of my learning over recent weeks has to do with the collaborative endeavor that is Modernism/modernity itself. I received a very warm welcome and most excellent support from the editorial staff, Anjali Nerlekar, Paisley Conrad, Rudrani Gangopadhyay, Harrington Weihl, Stefanie Sobelle, and Martin Harries. In addition to this highly effective team, many other people—including blog curators, cluster editors, peer reviewers, board members, editorial assistants, MSA officers, administrators at our various universities, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University Press—contribute to the production of Modernism/modernity's digital and print material. The observations of Staveley and co-authors about “the complex, distributed, and collective labor that generates new disciplinary knowledge” are just as relevant to this journal as they are to the Hogarth Press or to contemporary projects in the digital humanities.

The new print issue, 32.2, was put together by outgoing co-editor Stephen Ross, whom I’d like to thank for his generous mentoring over the past few months. The teaser article, up on Print Plus next week, offers a provocation, asking us to reimagine trans histories and futures through the artworks of the past—specifically early Soviet photomontage. Two superb essays on Faulkner, one on rural roads and the other on plantation assemblages, articulate beautifully with the infrastructural theme of the MSA conference this month. There are five more articles, including exciting work on Singaporean eco-modernist poetry, Japanese modernist fiction, and Haitian painting, together with a stimulating set of book reviews (see the table of contents at the link above). The reviews editors, Martin and Stefanie, have chosen H. N. Lukes’s review of Jordan Brower's Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System to appear on Print Plus because, as they say, this piece reminds us that reviews can—and ideally should—be excellent pieces of writing in their own right. Look out for it in two weeks’ time. Books are rarely reviewed collaboratively but the April 2025 issue features a fascinating co-authored review of Amy Elkins's Crafting Feminism: From Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present. Nat McGartland and Diana Proenza explore how Elkins develops collage as critical practice and uncovers shared crafting ethics of repair and restoration that connect women makers across time and space. McGartland and Proenza’s commentary on intergenerational collaboration takes me back to Print Plus, which has helped to catalyze the ethic of collaboration that is now so evident in modernist studies as a whole.

—Faye Hammill