Cathryn Setz’s research focuses on modernist literature and culture from the interwar period. Her first book, Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–38) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) explores the animal symbolism across the modernist magazine transition, with chapters exploring American and European Surrealism, Gottfried Benn and unsettling primitivisms, James Joyce, and transition’s editor Eugene Jolas. Cathryn is also a specialist on the work of American author and artist Djuna Barnes, and is co-Editor of Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism (Penn State University Press, 2019). Cathryn is currently working on a wide-ranging study of North American periodical culture and the “bad” science of popular biology. This is an archival study of the links between 1920s evolutionary biology as disseminated in the publishing industry and the literary culture both reifying and critiquing its frequently racist implications. Cathryn has published initial findings from this project in The Review of English Studies, as well as articles in Affirmations: of the Modern, Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity, Literature and History, Textual Practice, The Times Literary Supplement, and The LA Review of Books. She is also interested in the works of Mina Loy, queer culture and history, and masculinities in contemporary poetry and prose.
Cathryn has also taught widely across late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary subjects, both at the University of Oxford and at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is interested in public engagement, specifically in radio production and arts programming as a means of translating scholarly research to a wide audience in innovative and accessible ways.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=z4cHHg4AAAAJ&hl=en
Academia.edu: https://oxford.academia.edu/CathrynSetz
Twitter: @cathrynsetz
