Modernist Crossings - Archival Crossings (Co-hosted by MSIA and MSA’s Modernism & Environment SIG)

Friday, Oct. 30, 2026: 2-4pm UK / 3-5pm CET / 10am-noon EDT(New York) / 1-3am Sydney (October 31) / 10pm-midnight HK

Archival Crossings 

Event co-hosted by the Modernist Studies in Asia Network and the MSA’s Modernism & Environment SIG

Organizers: Boosung Kim, Sookyoung Lee, Anne Raine, Molly Volanth Hall, Xi Xu

• Tsung-Han Tsai (National Cheng Kung University): Kenkyūsha's Modern English Series: Dorothy Richardson in Taiwan
• Boriana Alexandrova (York University): Translation as Archival Method: Assembling the Archival Remnants of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore's Post-1937 Writings 
• Angela Acosta (University of South Carolina): Madrid's House of Poetry: Velintonia and the Artist-House as an Archive
• Davide Crosara (Universita Pegaso, Naples): Writing the Visual: Intermedial connections between painter Gastone Noveli and Samuel Beckett in the Novelli Archives
• Mark Byron (University of Sydney): On Ezra Pound’s interest in the Frobenius Institute’s study of Wanjina and Gwion Gwion Indigenous rock art: the written and the living archive
• Molly Porter (University of Washington): On assembling an archive of Black Elk fragments sourced from interpretive infrastructure across Indigenous and U.S. public lands
• Ruth Clemens (Leiden University): On experimental methods required to engage with materials such as avant-garde piano rolls in the small, chaotic, independent Pianola Museum in Amsterdam

This roundtable invites scholars who are working on small, extra-institutional, and otherwise lesser-known archives in transnational contexts to share their work in progress. We ask participants to expand the geographies of the modernist archive by giving a short presentation on the connections they are making in their research. From birth records at local parishes to cartographic remainders and timetables, from employee manuals to family letters, from understudied primary sources to sheer ephemera – what are the things and texts that convey how modernist ideas and aesthetics circulated and established themselves around the world? How do you translate? What are you doing with the documents – working to digitize them, researching the context, writing up a curatorial note?