Dr Michelle Taylor

Dr Michelle Alexis Taylor is the Armstrong T. S. Eliot Research Fellow at Magdalene.

I am a scholar of 20th century literature in English, with a particular focus on literary modernism and its afterlives. I am most interested in how writers imagine or create collectivity, especially beyond or outside of institutional settings, and my research draws on methods from book history, gender and sexuality studies, and literary sociology to rethink forms and histories of literary affinity.

My first book project, provisionally titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism, developed out of my doctoral research at Harvard. Defining coterie culture through its practices of restricted production, consumption, and circulation, this research re-situates modernist coterie culture both synchronically and diachronically — both within a centuries-long tradition of coterie circulation, and within the modernist period’s well-documented push towards literary professionalism and institutionalization. The book reveals how these intimate, circumscribed networks allowed an array of writers — among them T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Nancy Cunard — used coterie literature to reimagine literature’s capacity to cultivate and counter different forms of collectivity. In doing so, it develops new protocols for reading coterie literature (encompassing drama, verse, and prose), a category that has mostly eluded traditional literary analysis.

My fellowship project, T. S. Eliot, Translation, and the World Stage, tracks the global spread of translated Anglo-modernism through its reluctant figurehead, T. S. Eliot, asking: what exchanges of power — political, cultural, and interpersonal — transform a nationalist poet like Eliot, who famously claimed that ‘No art is more stubbornly national than poetry’, into a staple of the world literary canon? To answer this question, my project works at multiple scales: it is grounded, on the one hand, in the Eliot materials in Magdalene’s archives, particularly the roughly 215 books by Eliot in translation that form the majority of the Valerie Eliot Bequest. At the same time, it utilizes methods from the digital humanities to develop a more capacious understanding of the patterns and practices that characterized the global spread of Eliot’s writings in translation.

My research has benefited from previous postdoctoral fellowships at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where I was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow, and at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Alongside my academic work, I enjoy writing about literary (and occasionally rather less literary) topics for magazines like the Financial Times Magazine, The Point, The Fence, and The New Yorker.

Research Interests

  • Modernisms
  • Book history and material culture
  • Archives and archival studies
  • Sociology of literature
  • Gender and sexuality studies
  • Translation studies
  • Digital humanities
  • Poetry and poetics

Qualifications

  • BA, English, Yale University
  • AM, English, Harvard University
  • PhD, English, Harvard University

Career/Research Highlights

  • 2021-2023 Joanna Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford
  • 2022 British Association of Modernist Studies Essay Prize
  • 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow, Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University

Professional Affiliations

  • British Association of Modernist Studies
  • Modernist Studies Association
  • Modern Language Association
  • International T. S. Eliot Society

Selected Publications

“Outside Joke: Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater and Coterie Insularity,” Modernist Cultures 18.3 (2023), pp. 241-260. DOI: 10.3366/mod.2023.0403

“(In)discreet Modernism: T. S. Eliot’s Coterie Poetics,” College Literature (Special Issue: “Poetry Networks,” eds. Kamran Javadizadeh and Robert Volpicelli), vol. 47, no. 1 (2020), pp. 34-64. DOI: 10.1353/lit.2020.0011

“Discomfort,” in “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation,” cluster edited by Megan Quigley, Modernism/modernity Print plus platform, 7 March 2019. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/discomfort

Book chapters:

“Coterie Literature and the Affinities of the Archive” in Modernist Archives: A Handbook, eds. Jamie Christopher Callison, Anna Svendson and Erik Tonning (Bloomsbury, 2024)

With Elyse Graham, “Eliot in the Dadabase,” in Eliot Now, eds. David Chinitz and Megan M. Quigley (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Public engagement:

‘ “The Ode on a Grecian Urn” by Patricia Lockwood’, Close Readings with Kamran Javadizadeh, 19 February, 2024. Podcast: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/close-readings/michelle-a-taylor-on-hni_WTCmgIf/

‘Because I Have Not Existed,’ review of the The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young, Poetry Foundation, 20 June 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158199/because-i-have-not-existed

‘Moments of Being,’ interview with Jessica Swoboda for the series ‘Criticism in Public,’ The Point, 8 March 2022. https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/moments-of-being/

‘Come Slowly — Eden —,’ in The Limits of Interpretation, cluster ed. by Johanna Winant, Post45 Contemporaries, 26 May 2021. https://post45.org/2021/05/come-slowly-eden/

Panel participant: ‘T. S. Eliot & Emily Hale Letters: Re-examined’. Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Princeton University Library. Video:
https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/T.S.+Eliot+%26+Emily+Hale+LettersA+Re-examined/1_7vtzmy35/170320411

Afterthoughts: Issue 24, podcast for The Point magazine, 22 April, 202. Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/thepointmag/afterthoughts-issue-24

Review of Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, The Point Magazine 24, March 2021. https://thepointmag.com/criticism/no-one-is-talking-about-this/

“The Secret History of T. S. Eliot’s Muse,” The New Yorker online, 5 December 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secret-history-of-t-s-eliots-muse