Graham Borland, Hughes Hall

Biographical Information

Originally from Ireland, I previously studied at Maynooth University, County Kildare, where I completed an MA in Gender & Sexuality in Writing & Culture, funded by the Maynooth University Taught Master's Scholarship. My master's dissertation concerned mysticism and poetic form in H.D.'s long poems, exploring how apophasis and apocalypticism function as poetic and narrative techniques in her post-war writing. My undergraduate degree in English and philosophy is also from Maynooth.

       

Research Interests

Here at Cambridge, my current research concerns apophasis (or ‘negative theology’) in modernist literature. My project – focusing on the writings of Hugh MacDiarmid, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. – examines early-twentieth-century ideas about the ‘limits’ of human language or knowledge, and how modernists navigate the intellectual paradoxes and conflicting desires which spill out from such debates, cutting across religious, secularist, and esoteric thought. Of particular concern is how these writers use silence, failure, and negation to gesture towards things deemed otherwise inexpressible – and the strange dynamics that therein emerge between the religious and the secular, enchantment and disenchantment, certainty and doubt.

When I'm not contemplating the abyss, I can normally be found in my flat playing very sad songs on the ukulele. Please direct noise complaints, and any other queries, to gkb25[at]cam.ac.uk.

My doctoral studies are generously supported by the Robert Gardiner Memorial Scholarship, and the Cambridge Trust Vice-Chancellor’s/Hughes Hall PhD Scholarship.

General areas of interest include: modernism; twentieth-century British and Irish literature; literature and philosophy; literarature and religion; secularity; Western esotericism; gender and sexuality; and various other fields which I have no business dabbling in.

               

Selected Publications

Articles, book chapters, and reviews

‘Review: Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy, by Jamie Callison’. Reading Religion, American Academy of Religion (August 2024). <https://readingreligion.org/9781474457224/>

‘Signets Reborn: H.D.'s Serpent-and-Thistle Signet Ring and Louvre Museum Item Number BJ 1212’. Notes and Queries 71.1 (March 2024). 117-120. DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjad131 <https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/71/1/117/7560320>

‘Incidents in the order of time: epic and apocalyptic form in H.D.’s Trilogy and Helen in Egypt’, in The Sound of the Past: Modernist Echoes and Incantations (Delaware: Vernon Press). Forthcoming.

‘To an Unknown God: Lawrence, Spencer, Blavatsky, and the battle for the Unknowable’, in [a forthcoming edited collection on D. H. Lawrence]. Commissioned.

‘Review: Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination: Reinventing the Word, by Gregory Erickson’. The Modernist Review. Commissioned.

Presentations

‘Through a gas darkly, then face to face: strangers, truth, and nitrous oxide in Woolf’s essays and short fiction’. Woolf and Dissidence: the 34th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference. Kings College London & University of Sussex, 2025. Forthcoming.

‘Snake traps and signet rings: H.D. and Agathos Daimon at the Louvre Museum’. Classical Reception Seminar Series, University of Cambridge, 2024.

‘Hugh MacDiarmid's “incommunicable thing”: commonplacing, periodicals, and paranoia’. The Conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies: Ephemeral Modernisms. University of Leeds, 2024.

‘How to steal a ghost: methods of plagiarism and/or psychical research in Hugh McDiarmid’s Annals of the Five Senses (1923)’. Graduate Research Forum: Discovery. University of Cambridge, 2024.

‘“Obviously, Helen has walked through time”: apocalypse as anti-epic in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt’. Apocalypse Poetry II Symposium. University of Huddersfield, 2022.

‘Writing with porpoise: Woolf, “mysticism”, and aquatic life’. Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: the 28th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference. University of Kent, 2017.

Public engagement

Guest talk: ‘Introduction to the academic study of Western Esotericism: rejected knowledge and the myth of disenchantment’. Mystics Society, Cambridge Student Union, 2023.