Dr Michelle Taylor, Magdalene

mt777@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am the Armstrong T. S. Eliot Research Fellow at Magdalene College. Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, I completed my BA at Yale and my AM and PhD at Harvard, during which time I was a visiting student in the English Faculty at Cambridge. I have held two previous postdoctoral fellowships: from 2021 to 2023, I was the Joanna Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and in 2023-2024 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. 

Research Interests

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.

I am currently at work on two book projects: the first, Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism, proposes new methods for reading and understanding coterie culture and practice — especially vis-a-vis its relationship to emerging literary institutions — in the modernist period; it includes chapters on T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent, among others. The second, provisionally-titled 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? Drawing on methods from the digital humanities, this project makes significant use of the Valerie Eliot Bequest at Magdalene College. 

Alongside my academic work, I enjoy writing about literary (and occasionally less literary) topics for magazines like FT Mag, The Point, The Fence, and The New Yorker.

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

Selected 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

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