Five Years of Visualities

I. A Vision for Modernist Studies as Visual Studies

Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi

Five years ago, in August 2019, the Visualities forum was established as a site for thinking through the visual relations and ocular regimes of modernity. It posed three broad provocations: “In what new ways might we discuss the visual as a special category—aesthetic, epistemological, political—in modernism? How do different modes and practices of vision interact within the contested terrain of modernity? How can specific visual artifacts reframe our assumptions about modernism, its temporal and geographical planes, and its expanded media ecology?” These questions were addressed to scholars in the field of (new) modernist studies. Despite its decades-long ambitions to expand its definitional boundaries and objects of study, this field—our field—remains preoccupied with the literary arts and continues to be a home primarily for scholars and students trained in, or working in or around, English departments.

The visual is in key respects the privileged sensory terrain of modernity, thanks largely to the new modes of spectatorship afforded by the development of technologies such as train travel, photography, and film, not to mention the forms of modern visual apprehension associated with Baudelairean flaneury, Benjaminian phantasmagoria, and Debordian spectacle. Yet, when scholars engage with the question of the visual within modernist studies, there’s a tendency to insist on thinking it in tandem with the literary, or to use it to explain the literary. In short, despite the primacy of the visual within the modern episteme, scholars of modernist studies still struggle to take visuality and visual objects as sources of historical and theoretical inquiry on their own terms. To be sure, this sort of cross-disciplinary scholarship has yielded tremendously useful and illuminating insights. It’s a mode of working that is essential for understanding the modernist aesthetic landscape, in which artists and writers often worked fluidly across media in ways that disciplinary silos can obscure. It’s also a form of scholarly inquiry in which each of us received our training, focusing on the interaction of US modernist literature, especially prose writing, with photography and film. Even so, with very few exceptions modernist studies has largely remained a form of literary studies. And, although art history remains invested in the study of modernism (though usually at a distance from modernist studies per se), these have not been key terms of reference for scholars in the dynamic field of film and media studies in the twenty-first century. What we’ve yet to witness is a comprehensive and influential reckoning with visual culture as entailing its own robust canons of specifically modernist inquiry.

There have been signs of change within the field in recent years. There have been efforts, for instance, to draw film and media studies and modernist studies into deeper conversation with one another through the annual conference. The Modernist Studies Association’s new Special Interest Group in Film Studies generated a stream of panels at last month’s 2024 MSA conference in Chicago dedicated to film and film culture, as well as a robustly attended workshop. And the local organizing committee scheduled a screening and discussion of Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film Passing as a program highlight (though in this latter case, investment in the cinematic, as Rafael Walker has argued in Visualities, again proceeds from the literary). Visual genres apart from film have continued to be less well represented at the conference, however. In a simple keyword search of the program, visual culture appears twice, and photography only once; remarkably, there isn’t a single reference to visual art or art. This is a crude measure, of course, and it doesn’t catch references to specific artists or visual projects. But the contrast to the fifteen references to literature or literary is nevertheless telling.

The Visualities forum is distinctive in the field of modernist studies in at least two respects. First, it is committed to the analysis of specific images and visual artifacts across mediums (ranging, for example, from Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath [The Elephant God, 1979] and Monet’s The Japanese Bridge [1899] to early-1920s photographs of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Leonor Fini’s 1936 art object Couverture d'un Livre). The forum proceeds from the assumption that modernist studies gives us key critical tools with which to examine such visual artifacts not in terms of the literary but as distinct from it, demanding their own rubrics of engagement and theorization. And second, given what we recognize to be the power of images and the cultures, institutions, and affects that emerge in and around them, Visualities is open to and encourages critical-creative approaches to the study of visual culture. As such, the forum has shown the value and, we believe, necessity of realizing the promise of modernist studies as an iteration of visual studies.

One of the most rewarding aspects of editing Visualities has indeed been seeing how scholars in the field have taken up its call for creative and experimental writing about images. In Natalie Ferris’s beautiful meditation on women’s asemic writing, a range of dashes and other punctuation marks are adapted as rhythmic markers within the prose, a means of transcribing the indecipherable in visual poetry. In Anne Anlin Cheng’s poetic address in Part 1 of our Judging by its Cover series, the gaping spaces between the poem’s already brief lines recreate in aesthetic form the yawning space where a head used to be, or never was, above the stunning and constricting bodice made of beads, silk, and chiffon that adorns the cover of Cheng’s Ornamentalism. In Alix Beeston’s associative exploration of effects of blur in three photographs, image and text refer to one another, sharing and compounding their qualities of contingency and allusiveness. And when Pardis Dabashi writes of Nella Larsen’s movie-going, she does so in the form of a letter to Larsen herself, expressing in an unusually direct way the desires and feelings that go into the making of scholarly work.

Again and again, the authors’ personal investments in and experiences of modernist visual objects are shown to be essential to, rather than submerged within, their critical understandings of the same. A 1932 photograph of three biracial children on a street in Limehouse, London, precipitates Nadine Attewell’s moving reflection of her “mixed feelings about being seen,” just as studying photography more generally has prompted her to “[lean] into disorientation,” surprise, and personal transformation. For Attewell—as for Louise Hornby when she finds herself “On the Verge of Tears” in the archive of images of crying women and children, or for Juno Richards when they engage the unresolvable “wrongness” of “Claude Cahun’s Pronouns”—the knowledge entailed in modernist objects of vision is both analytic and affective, a knowing pitched between observation and feeling. Modernist images are objects of meaning and attachment with a special purchase on contemporary visual cultures, from the graphic novels and zines that honor Cahun as “a trans elder and nonbinary ancestor” surveyed by Richards, to the contemporary visions of “what a feminist looks like” which, as Georgia Monaghan shows, receive from figurations of the New Woman in illustrated newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century. Affects of critical detachment and distance may be stubbornly associated with the repertoire of high modernism and modernist criticism, but those affects, as these pieces showcase, are productively embarrassed by modernism’s own visual objects and their long and ongoing afterlives.

Visualities may be the space in modernist studies that is manifestly participating in the wider turn toward speculation and other critical-creative methods that have emerged, particularly in film and photography studies, as a response to the limits placed by conventional humanistic research on historiographical and theoretical inquiry. We take inspiration, for instance, from the speculative archival work of Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema, which theorizes the kinds of informed conjecture that scholars can engage in when confronted with the unevenness of the historical record resulting from racialized histories of exclusion and violence. We learn, too, from Katherine Groo’s Bad Film Histories, which calls into question the authority of the archive in the discipline of film studies and theorizes the alternative sites and methods of analysis at the edges of mainstream early film history. And we pick up on Saidiya Hartman’s strategies of “close narration” of photographs and other historical materials in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.[1] Hartman’s innovations are wrought through images and texts from the modernist moment, yet, in our view, the modernist stakes of her influential work remain to be fully appreciated within our field—not least through new approaches to the rich materials that are accessible via digital archives and exhibits of modernist visual cultures, including those we featured in a special series in 2020.

The breadth and creativity of the writing in Visualities has been secured in part through a highly involved, developmental editorial process and a wider emphasis on collaboration. This shared labor has been capacitated and underwritten by the expert and enthusiastic leadership of the five co-editors of Modernism/modernity with whom we have had the privilege of working, namely Debra Rae Cohen, Christopher Bush, Anne Fernald, Anjali Nerlekar, and Stephen Ross—and we are delighted to include Ross’s reflections on the forum’s first five years as a companion piece to our remarks below. Remaining open-minded about the form and style of the writing in the forum, especially as it responds to the qualities of the visual objects under discussion, we’ve discovered with our authors new registers or conceits through the close, reciprocal work of revision, passed between author and editor. Resisting the solitariness of much scholarly writing in the humanities, we’ve also encouraged pieces by collectives—such as the teams behind the archival projects Cinema’s First Nasty Women, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, and Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde—as well as by interdisciplinary or cross-generational pairs. The collaboration of the modernist scholar and visual artist Amy E. Elkins (now the editor of the Orientations forum) and the craft historian and curator Glenn Adamson produced not only a fascinating discussion of the figure of the woman typist from modernism to the present but, in addition, Elkins’s “experiment in feminist technography,” a composite poem printed on yellow paper à la Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). Meanwhile, a conversation between a PhD student and faculty member from the same department, Rachel Warner and Heidi Kim, respectively, led to a revelatory account of how Lee Isaac Chung’s 2020 film Minari signifies on Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia.

Visualities has, in fact, emerged as a site of innovation in no small measure because it has centered the work of emerging scholars, who are reimagining the field through their revisionist, rule-breaking scholarship. Of the more than fifty authors we’ve worked with so far, graduate students represent almost a fifth, and we remain committed to learning from and platforming the next generation of modernist scholars, in whose hands lies the future of the field. In line with this ethos and intention, we also feature below a short piece exploring the forum’s back-catalogue and achievements by Jess Masters, the MSA’s incoming Graduate Student Representative and a current PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

Working together, including across generations and disciplines, can allow us to think and write in ways we couldn’t otherwise. But there’s also something about images themselves that encourage us, indeed require us, to set aside the standardized protocols of formal academic style and to develop new modes of scholarly work that can account for their unpredictable, variegated, and often confounding effects and affects. Modernist visual objects draw us in, exerting a pull on us. They also put a kind of pressure on us, confronting us over the situated conditions of our scholarly labor, forcing us to reckon with the fact of our body–minds interacting with them in space and time. Images, in short, don’t allow us to forget our motivated, ongoing entanglements with our objects of study. The activity and vitality of images in this sense can be highlighted and accommodated via Visualities’ digital format, which has the advantage over print of allowing for the reproduction of numerous full-color, high-quality images and videos with text (albeit without avoiding the costs associated with the use of works in copyright, which can be particularly prohibitive for precarious scholars and academics without access to substantial research funds). Visualities thus constitutes a response to James Elkins’s challenge, in Theorizing Visual Studies, for scholars to embrace the disruptive force of images in their work, rather than to treat images as only ornaments or mnemonic aids to writing.[2] Equally, we believe, we must not treat images as ornamental or supplemental to our conceptions of modernism and modernity. We must instead allow images and visual cultures to perturb, augment, and transform our sense of modernist aesthetics, media ecologies, contexts, and politics. We must realize modernist studies as visual studies—and visual studies as modernist studies.

II. At/in/out/beyond: Looking Like a Modernist

Jess Masters

Visualities, under the co-editorship of Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi, has commanded a space for close-seeing as well as close-reading, drawing out the specific significance of visual inquiry for a modernist field premised on visual and interdisciplinary encounters. Beeston concluded the forum’s inaugural article by asking “what it means to look like a modernist, to look in a modernist way.” The eye/I are not homophonous by accident, nor the (presumed) synonyms I see/I know: what can it mean, then, to approach a modernist work not necessarily as a reader or scholar, but to approach a work through modernism as a mode of viewing—to modernist-see and modernist-read? To reach through, around, behind, and embrace the surface of the image in a modernist way, with all the potential “seeing” that the field offers? Does looking like a modernist mean, as Beeston says elsewhere in the forum, being “invited to see bodies where there are none,” or to celebrate with Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi the “defiant, messy, willful and obstreperous women of the silent screen,” whose mute bodies scream, rage, and laugh hysterically? Can we listen to photographs, touch image-text, read between-ness, believe in ghosts? If so, can we do so by heralding poetry as scholarship, as when Anne Anlin Cheng reflects on how she “put a name/where the head would be” on the cover of her book Ornamentalism, and by acknowledging paradox, as when Katherine Groo muses on how the cover of Incomplete incarnates the “visual abundance” of an historical archive also marked by “scarcity” and peopled with “fragile survivors”?

Looking like a modernist has sometimes meant dealing in a hermeneutics of suspicion that seems, at times, to be a default mode for modernist studies (and perhaps an inheritance of modernism itself). As Dabashi notes in her letter to Nella Larsen in the forum, a conventional mode of looking for a modernist is to parse the text for clues—to “critique” because “to see is to see through.” But we might stop instead to parse the surface instead and examine where the folded edges of the visual turn back into uncertain shadow. Although Dabashi knows that the “sin of identification” and “delicate waywardness” of scholarly intimacy will surely bring admonishment (“They tell us,” she writes, “that this is not a modernist way of looking”), for her, looking like a modernist could mean choosing still to be seduced, to be intimate, to be “rabid” for the text and the void, to tear words apart with one’s fingers and starve for forms, to counter the violence of rabidity with equal intensities of care and desire—or perhaps not, and revel in the rage, hunger, and erotically unfeminine behaviours that undergird so-called objective analysis. The “misalignments,” in Juno Richards’s terms, of “over-attaching, falling in love with, perverting, stealing, sometimes Xeroxing or misquoting” become modes of knowledge creation in the queer archive, and we are left, as Lorraine Sim explains, “to speculate, to weave stories, and wrestle with the partial disclosures” that constitute the visual field.

In revisiting the first five years of Visualities, it becomes apparent that engaging with affective forms such as speculation, intimacy, seduction, and uncertainty, requires a different kind of scholarship. The forum’s exploration of what “doing modernism” looks like and the ideas/objects/texts which we “do modernism” to—including what it could look like for those objects, those images, to act on us in return—rejects modernism’s “anxiety of contamination” in favor of a hearty (heart-filled) disease of subjectivity. If, as Andreas Huyssen describes, modernism operated “through a conscious strategy of exclusion,” and the new modernist studies prioritized “expansion,” the first five years of Visualities has entailed a long glance back in the mirror, a searching gaze that reaches inside and beyond the looking glass—including what results when we turn back and look at the entirety of ourselves.[3] Within a scholarly field that is, according to Sarah Cole, bookended by two canonically invisible men—H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)—Visualities has prioritised other modes of (un)seeing.[4] How looking, seeing, and knowing are entwined with their indispensable opposites—blindness, doubt, uncertainty, shadow, and absence—is a key matter at hand. In Mia Florin-Sefton’s words on before-and-after photographs that try to defy the degeneration of time, what matters most “is not what the viewer is predisposed to see, or even what the viewer thinks they see,” but “the very fact of having been made to look.”

Visualities has wedged open a space not only for visual studies in modernist studies, but for examination of the unseen, the invisible, and the historically absent and silent, and for modes of knowing that aren’t conventionally understood as authoritative and valuable. I’m struck by the forum’s welcoming of the scholar-as-subject, something I learned to disavow in introductory academic writing courses: the person(al), the felt, the fearful, and the risk of failure, which open onto what Nadine Attwell describes as her “decidedly mixed feelings about being seen.” The Cartesian mode of the disembodied viewer and displaced gaze are struck out in favor of eyes firmly stuck in a fleshly body, looking inward as much as out. Visualities has offered a space for scholarship that is “haunting” (Sim) or even “terrifying” (Phillip Maciak). It has offered a space, too, for creative output as scholarly practice, such as Amy E. Elkins’s yellow-paper experiment in technography, and for imagination as a research method, as when Sim pictures what Australian photographer E. G. Shaw would have worn while walking Sydney as “the ghost outside the frame.” The gaps between seeing and knowing are rushed by Natalie Ferris’s treatise on asemic writing (long the purview of male theoreticians) to highlight women’s possession of meaning and ways of unfixing the world; by Oishani Sengupta re-watching Ja Baba Felunath while packing up her dissertation materials; and by Beeston’s associative inquiries of a blurred photograph that “arrives—dances—at seeing’s limits” to notice “something recessing from us,” a haunting of the unseen that lingers on the borders of and is woven throughout the forum. When Dabashi laments how Nella Larsen’s eyes are “eaten by the Cypress Hill Cemetery worms,” I am left with literal remains/what remains/how death is the eidos of the photograph, and how, in examining and prioritizing the visual, we resurrect the dead and the detritus left behind at the conclusion of the standard survey courses of modernism (Monet’s cataracts, blurry photographs, book cover designs, Sylvia Plath’s skirt). Each photograph or film revisits light once projected, each objet d’art the surplus of human work at play, each negative bleached and silver reverse-exposed to new light. Within mantras of publish-or-perish, Visualities contends we can publish-the-perished, bring to light uncertain fates, and feel out what kinds of scholarship can fill the gap.

If the gaze holds the power to view, what does the mirror, the lens, the machine, the portrait see when it looks back/at you? Can we trust and distrust our eye simultaneously, with curiosity instead of categorization, including all the distasteful, extraneous disorder it produces? Louise Hornby contemplates photography’s “messy, childish” tears to show how they “discombobulate” or “disturb the composure of the face” and rearrange, chart, alter that face through the “unruly excesses” of the objective-eye turned feeling-subject. I look from these women’s faces to my own and to a field that is undergoing continual change: if we looked at the face of modernist studies, what would we see looking back at us? Mena Mitrano articulates this perspective as a “shift” from a “preoccupation with the gaze of the other to my own gaze on myself,” breaking down the mechanics and semantics of looking. While my own gaze sees the ever-present scarcity and precarity in our field, it also sees generosity, the pleasures of slowness, and the possibilities in places like Visualities, where rigorous knowledge can embrace various anxieties of influence, intimacy, and contamination—and demonstrate new ways of looking like a modernist. Finding a new vision for modernist studies means we must commune with our own reflection, consider our considerations, hear the cadence of our and others’ concerns, and agree to willingly suspend belief in the mirror’s “unimpeachable veracity” that Beeston calls, in that first Visualities piece, a “terrible magic.” And as Visualities expands the latent space between seeing/viewing/knowing (I see), it offers us a chance to write from beyond the surface as both the I/eye that sees and the I-that-is-not-I, and to watch the silhouettes that our scholarship makes.

III. Visualities at Five: Reflections on the En Dehors Garde

Stephen Ross

Reading through the full run of Visualities, I was struck by a quotation of Achille Mbembe from Lorraine Sim’s January 21, 2021 post, “On Seeing Ghosts,” a brilliant piece about overlooked Australian women photographers such as Pegg Clarke and E. G. Shaw. Sim writes that for Mbembe the “status” of the archive is not only a material but an “imaginary one,” by which he means the archive is “always situated outside its own materiality, in the story it makes possible.”[5] I’ll pluck this quotation out of context and say for me it captures what makes the blog form as Alix and Pardis have constructed and curated it so generative. I mean to highlight the “imaginary” existence of the visual cultures featured in the blog, their flickering between the material and immaterial. By “immaterial” I want to emphasize not just the de- and re-materializations of the image but also how Alix’s and Pardis’s editorial work attends to that which has been “overlooked” or, more precisely, underlooked. Call it not the avant-garde or arrière-garde but the en dehors garde, to use the term Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum coin in their digital scholarly book Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (see their blog post of October 21, 2020, in Visualities’ special series on Digital Archives).

One of the things I love about Visualities, rereading the full five-year run for the roundtable at the MSA 2024 conference marking the forum’s fifth anniversary, is the unanticipated resonances that emerge across posts. I’ve selected three to highlight the contributions of my interlocutors at the panel—Alix, Pardis, and Sarah Parker—as they themselves are in dialogue with so many others:

First, Pardis’s first post from November 2019: a letter to Nella Larsen that is “a reproduction, a plagiaristic mimicking of [Larsen's] opening lines to Edward Wasserman—‘Eddie’” in a letter she wrote to him on April 16, 1928, which asks Larsen why she loved George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille so much. We came full circle at MSA 2024 with the screening of Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Passing—a film reviewed by Rafael Walker in a November 2021 blog post—and the plenary roundtable on the film in which both Pardis and Rafael were respondents. All of this resonates, in an oblique en-dehors-garde sort of way, with the most recent Visualities post, an epistolary exchange between Jordan Brower and Sarah Gleeson-White about another Camille, Ralph Barton and Anita Loos’s Camille; or, the Fate of a Coquette, their 1926 home movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel La Dame aux camélias (1848).

Second, an offhand reference to a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks—Chicagoan!—sitting at her typewriter in “Typestruck: Women and Writing Machines” (July 2020) by Amy Elkins and Glenn Adamson, and the surprising reappearance of Brooks and her typewriter in Sophie Oliver’s and Sarah Parker’s “Material Matters: Dressmaking and Exhibition-making for “Poets in Vogue” (August 2023). The first figure in the latter post, a celebration of Oliver’s and Parker’s “Poets in Vogue” installation at the Southbank Centre, features Brooks’s “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” (1945) spiraling out of an Underwood No. 5 typewriter and across the wall. “Part way through the exhibition ‘Poets in Vogue,’” Oliver writes, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s mock-epic poem . . . materializes on the wall, splendid and opulent. Its lines, enlarged, emerge out of looping twists and folds of silk; Brooks’s words bloom among fabric flowers.”

And finally, the very first image/figure that appears in Visualities, in the very first post by Alix Beeston, “Looking like a Modernist” (August 2019), is of Claude Cahun in “Self Portrait with Mirror 1928.” I want to quote a long excerpt of Alix’s brilliant commentary on this photograph because of how well it models the intelligence and eye for detail that radiate throughout Visualities:

It was Claude Cahun who made me think of the Queen. I was trying to work through the directness and indirectness of Cahun’s gaze in her 1928 self-portrait by a mirror, her body encased in a checkered jacket, buttoned up, collar popped. The mirror seems sinister in this image, much as it will a decade later in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, rendered as a purple-masked face in a pool of fire. In Cahun’s self-portrait, her throat is exposed to the reflective surface, the muscle connecting sternum to skull straining under tender skin and the mirror’s glare. It makes her seem vulnerable, at risk.

Even so, she’s indifferent to the mirror’s counsel, which she dismisses—as she draws near to it—by the smooth, slanted curve of her cheek, the whites of her averted eyes. The mirror is a mere prop in the portrait scenario, relevant only as an appendage to the camera, a mechanism for expanding its formal range of sight. It’s the camera that pulls Cahun’s attention, and it’s the camera’s testimony—particular yet partial, overt yet allusive—that she seeks. Because she looks at the camera, we feel her eyes on us, holding us. Yet, as in so many of Cahun’s self-portraits, her eyes are equivocal in their expression, daring us to look and daring us not to look. In a single gesture, we, like the mirror, are pulled close and pushed away.

If the Queen wants her reflection to secure her place in the social and political order of the world, Cahun wants hers to disrupt that order altogether. I see in her self-portrait coded signs of the instrumentalized uses to which photography was put in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the work of eugenicists, criminologists, medical practitioners, and others to build, photograph by photograph, systems for social organization and control. Apart from the mirror itself, there’s the filing cabinet, black and bulky, and the framed photograph that rests on top of it. These objects stand in for the vast archives of photographic images that were assembled to quantify people as sociobiological types and to insert them into hierarchies of value. Who is the fairest one of all? The racial connotations of the Queen’s guiding question—as of the snowy whiteness of the stepdaughter she scorns—are already blatant. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the so-called “sciences of identity” began to scrutinize the body ever more ruthlessly, the Queen’s question is given in a regulatory, bureaucratic register.

Claude Cahun returns two years later in Juno Richards’s April 2021 post “Claude Cahun’s Pronouns,” which features images of a Cahun tote bag, a mug with Cahun’s famous quotation “Under this mask is another mask, I will never be finished removing all these faces,” a reproduction of Cahun’s famous t-shirt saying “I am in training don’t kiss me” (the image of Cahun wearing this adorns the November 2021 issue of Modernism/modernity, pulled from Austin Hancock’s article “Queering Modernism's Masculine Arena: In the Boxing Ring with Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”), Claude Cahun stickers, and images from and a link to the digitized text of Micah Bazant’s Timtum: A Trans Jew Zine (1999), in which Cahun features as a guiding light. Discovering Bazant’s zine was just one of the many, many revelations of Visualities for me, just as Cahun is a shining member of the enormous ensemble cast of feminist writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, dressmakers, chart-makers of the apocalypse, typists, inventors, entrepreneurs, digital archivists, dramaturgs, dancers, asemic writers, fashion designers, ad copyists, fabricators of found objects, academic book cover artists, and so many more who populate the thirty-three (and counting!) blog posts that Pardis and Alix have edited over the past five years. It has been a privilege to serve in the (now quite long) line of editors who have collaborated with them on one of the most vibrant and generous forums in modernist studies.