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Miranda Brun Hickman

Miranda Brun Hickman
Contact Information
Phone: 
514-398-6918
Email address: 
miranda.hickman [at] mcgill.ca
Address: 

Arts 140B
Arts Building
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, QC H3A 0G5
Canada

Group: 
Faculty Members
Position: 
Associate Professor
Stream: 
Literature
Specialization by geographical area: 
Great Britain
United States
Transatlantic
Specialization by time period: 
20th-Century
Modernism
Area(s): 
Poetry & Poetics
Aesthetics
Archives & Bibliography
Critical Theory
Identity & Representation
Areas of expertise: 

Transatlantic modernisms, modern poetry, gender and modernism, textual criticism, gender studies, history of twentieth-century literary criticism, the Victorian fin de siècle, periodical studies; women in cultural criticism in British interwar culture and the construction of authority; history of English as a discipline; poetry and public cultures.

Biography: 

I work in transatlantic modernist studies and twentieth-century studies, with a focus on early twentieth-century poetry and experimental fiction, often through the lenses of gender and feminist studies, textual scholarship, and literary and cultural history. Another area of inquiry is the history of the discipline – and big tent – that we still call “English,” with an eye toward how such practices as criticism and “close reading” have been theorized in evolving ways as the field has developed. I am co-founder and director of the Poetry Matters initiative at McGill.

Recent work in feminist modernist studies has taken me to modernist classical reception—especially poet H.D.’s translations of Euripides; to pioneering film critic Iris Barry; to early twentieth-century critic Q.D. Leavis; and to early twentieth-century avant-garde artists Jessie Dismorr and Helen Saunders. I am author of The Geometry of Modernism (2005), author and editor of One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott (2011); coeditor (with J. McIntyre) of Rereading the New Criticism (2012), and coeditor (with L. Kozak) of The Classics in Modernist Translation (2019). Current work focuses on deep literacy and poetic attention, as well as on the female public intellectual in interwar Britain.

Academic Positions:

Director, Poetry Matters Project
Acting Director, Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (2019-20)
Acting Associate Dean, Arts (2018-19)

Degree(s): 

M.A., Ph.D., (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
B.A., (Brown)

Link(s): 
Poetry Matters
Selected publications: 

Edited Volumes

The Classics in Modernist Translation, eds. Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak (Bloomsbury, 2019). Includes Hickman and Kozak, “Reinventing Eros: H.D.’s Translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus.”

Book cover of "The Classics in Modernist Translation" edited by Lynn Kozak and Miranda Hickman

Rereading the New Criticism, eds. Miranda Hickman and John D. McIntyre. (Ohio State University Press, 2012—reissued in paperback, 2015)

Articles and Book Chapters

“Q.D. Leavis, Archives, and the ‘Art of Living.’” Historicizing Modernisms (Bloomsbury, 2021)

“Mixing the Brows in Print: Iris Barry’s Film Criticism.” Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1880-1920 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

“Poppies, scarlet flowers, ‘this beauty’: H.D.’s Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and the First World War” (coauthored with Lynn Kozak). Classical Receptions Journal 10.4 (October 2018)

“Self Condemned: Casualties of the Vortex.” Wyndham Lewis. (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

“Modernist Women Poets.” A Companion to Modernist Poetry. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)

“The Gender of Vorticism: Jessie Dismorr and Helen Saunders.” Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2013)

“‘Uncanonically Seated’: H.D. and Literary Canons.” The Cambridge Companion to H.D. (2011)

“Modernist Women Poets and the Problem of Form.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. (2010)

“‘Not ... Love-Verses at All, I Perceive’: Joyce’s Minor Works.” Visions and Revisions: James Joyce. (Irish Academic Press, 2009)

“The Complex Art of Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Simple Art of Murder,” Studies in the Novel 25.3. (2003)

“'Sparse and Geometric Contour': Transformations of the Body in H.D.'s Nights,” Twentieth Century Literature 47.3. (2001)

Reviews

Rev. of Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism, by Michael Coyle and Roxana Preda (Modernism/ modernity: Modernist Baedekers, Fall 2019)

Publication files: 
PDF icon hickman_leavis_archives.pdf
PDF icon hickman_barry_mixing_brows.pdf
Awards, honours, and fellowships: 
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Connection Grants, 2021-22, 2019-20, 2018-19 (Poetry Matters)

  • Insight Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 2013-2018

  • H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, Faculty of Arts, McGill University, 2013

  • Louis Dudek Award for Teaching Excellence, Department of English, McGill University, 2009 and 2010

  • Carrie M. Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision and Teaching, McGill University, 2006

  • Social Science and Humanities Research Council Grant, for an annotated edition of the correspondence of Ezra Pound and publisher Stanley Nott, 2003

Graduate supervision: 

Open to graduate supervision in the areas of transatlantic modernisms, especially poetry and experimental fiction; early to mid-twentieth-century literature; gender studies, women’s writing, and history of feminism; textual scholarship; history of English as a discipline.

Taught previously at: 

University of Tulsa
University of Michigan, Ann Arbour 

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