Anna Dijkstra, Lucy Cavendish

Biographical Information

I have a background in English literature and philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, and worked at the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam as researcher and academic coordinator from 2023 to 2024, after which I joined Lucy Cavendish College to pursue an MPhil in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, kindly funded by the Cultuurfonds and the Hendrik Mullerfonds. Here, I aim to focus on exploring the various entanglements of epistemology and modernist poetics.

I am always looking for opportunities to contribute to academic communities; past experiences include a three-year role as editor-in-chief and managing editor of Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis, and guest editor for Integrated Modernisms, a special issue of Echinox Journal. I am also involved as research assistant with the ERC-advanced funded project MORE, investigating moral residue and transformative reading. If you would like to get in touch, please feel free to reach out!

Research Interests

modernist poetics; epistemology; experimental and transgressive literature; literature and philosophy; affect and phenomenology; animal studies.

Selected Publications

Publications

“Epistemological Violence between Affect and Aesthetic: Rationalist Rhetoric in the Novel of Ideas.” Integrated Modernisms, special issue of Echinox Journal, vol. 47, 2024, pp. 46-60, doi:10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.03.

“Kafka’s Spaces: A Telephonic Journey.” Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis, 12 Sept. 2024, www.soapboxjournal.net/online-articles/kafkas-spaces-a-telephonic-journey.

 “The Art of Textual Landscaping.” Ephemeral Modernisms, special issue of The Modernist Review, vol. 53, 26 Aug. 2024, modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2024/08/26/the-art-of-textual-landscaping/. 

“Angus Fletcher, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence.” British Society for Literature and Science, 2024. www.bsls.ac.uk/angus-fletcher-storythinking-the-new-science-of-narrative-intelligence/. Book review.

“Book Review: Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities.” The Modernist Review, 2023, vol. 48, modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2023/09/06/book-review-physics-and-the-modernist-avant-garde-quantum-modernisms-and-modernist-relativities/.

“A Phenomenological Conceptualization of the Communication between Dogs and their Human Companions.” NL-Lab, 2022, nl-lab.net/publicaties/working-papers/a-phenomenological-conceptualization-of-the-communication-between-dogs/. Working paper.

“Book Review: Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce.” The Modernist Review, 2022, vol. 42, modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2022/09/30/book-review-hope-form-and-future-in-the-work-of-james-joyce/.

“A Posthuman Understanding of Alienation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.” Metamorphosis: Transformations across Time, Culture & Identity, 2022, pp. 109-20, www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_855940_smxx.pdf.

 

Conference Presentations

“Von Ficker, Wittgenstein, and Literary Silence.” New Work in Modernist Studies, British Association for Modernist Studies, 13 Dec. 2024, University of East Anglia.

“Listening for Silence through the Noise of (Wittgen)Stein’s Tender Buttons.” Ephemeral Modernisms, British Association for Modernist Studies, 29 June 2024, University of Leeds.

“Disquieting as Literary Effect: Modernist Silences and an Epistemological Hermeneutic.” New Work in Modernist Studies, British Association for Modernist Studies, 8 Dec. 2023, University of Liverpool, hybrid.

“Aesthetics of Rationality in The Man Without Qualities: The Novel of Ideas and the Contemporary Far-Right.” Uses of Modernism, 22 Sept. 2023, Ghent University.

“From Spatial Logic to Epistemology in Kafka’s The Castle.” Logic and Modern Literature CUSO Doctoral Workshop, 16 Sept. 2023, University of Lausanne.

“Poetics of Non-Contradiction in Modernist Subjectivity: Reading HERmione with Dialetheism.” Logic and Modern Literature, 14 Sept. 2023, University of Lausanne.

“Modernism’s Epistemological Futures in Kafka’s The Castle.” Bouncing Forward: Future Narratives, Scenarios, and Transformations in the Study of Culture, European Summer School in Cultural Studies and TransHumanities Network, 22 June 2023, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen.

“The Inevitability of Technological Disaster in the Modernist Narrative: Alienation, Abstraction, and Mechanophobia in Manhattan Transfer and ‘A Hunger Artist.’” Machine Modernism, 16 June 2023, University of Bamberg.

“Postmodernist Writing as Disembodiment in Naked Lunch and Blood and Guts in High School.” Contemporary Modernisms, 27 May 2023, Goethe University Frankfurt.

“The Modernist Maximalist Novel as Incomplete Epistemological Ecosystem.” Incomplete (Eco)systems, 5 March 2023, University of Montréal, hybrid.

“Labyrinths without End: Double Haunting and Commodification in Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Terrorized by Twins: Doppelgängers and the Specter of the Double, 30 Oct. 2021, University of Texas Permian Basin, hybrid.

“A Posthuman Understanding of Alienation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.” Metamorphosis: Transformations across Time, Culture & Identity, 2 June 2021, University of Glasgow, hybrid.