Steph Brown

Interests

Research

Feminism and the surveillance state in Britain, anglophone modernist literature, twentieth century women's movements in Britain and the empire, social movements in Britain, 1867-1930, citizenship theory and protest movements

Teaching

Anglophone modernism, twentieth-century British literature, twentieth century anglophone women's literature, literary theory, law and literature in the British Empire 1850-1950, social movements in Britain 1867-1930, citizenship theory, the novel post-1900, Shakespeare, rhetoric and composition

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Brown, S. J. (2019). The Call. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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  In the fall of 2015, I began the process of assembling a critical edition of Edith Ayrton Zangwill's novel The Call, which has been out of print for several decades. The prospective critical edition will involve an introduction and historical notes written by me, short critical essays by several other scholars of women's literature and history, the British women's suffrage movement, and World War I, and, of course, the text of the novel. In December of 2015 I began corresponding with the series editor for Bloomsbury Academic's Modernist Archives series, and after meeting with him at the MLA conference in January 2016, I solicited abstracts for critical essays from a group of senior scholars, wrote a proposal, and submitted it in May of 2016. This proposal was accepted in summer of 2017, with contracts from all contributors signed in the fall of 2017.

Chapters

• Brown, S. J. (2022). Claude McKay. In Twentieth Century Literary Criticism(p. 5). Gale/Cengage.
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  Encyclopedia-style essay on the life and works of Jamaican Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, including an overview of scholarly work on McKay.
• Brown, S. J. (2021). Woolf's Feminism. In Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf(pp 311-325). Oxford University Press.
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  “Woolf's Feminism.” Chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf. (Edited volume from Oxford University Press, Anne Fernald, ed., 2021.)

Journals/Publications

• Brown, S. J. (2021). Marseille Exposed: Under Surveillance in Claude McKay's Banjo and Romance in Marseilles. English Language Notes Special Issue: Transhistoricizing Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille, 59(1), 93-108. doi:10.1215/00138282-8815005
• Brown, S. (2016). "Too recent to be innocuous": An Interwar View of Women’s Suffrage in Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s _The Call_. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.
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  Journal article that argues that Zangwill's 1924 novel looks back on the British women's suffrage movement and women's war work in order to advocate a more inclusive and expansive form of feminist activism than is available in the years immediately after the First World War.
• Brown, S. J. (2017). Unlikely Interlocutors for Modernism: Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Workman’s Dreadnought and the Poems of Claude McKay. Literature and History.
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  Invited article based on conference presentation at Modernism and Collaboration conference in Lugano, Switzerland, for a special issue of Literature and History on the theme "Modernist Collaborations." Publication date will by May, 2019. Abstract: Sylvia Pankhurst is best known as a suffragette or an early advocate of communism in Britain, and it has been under the latter moniker that her work as editor of the radical journal The Worker’s Dreadnought (1917-1924) has been typically examined. Yet during 1920, the Dreadnought contained one of modernism’s more fascinating collaborations: that year, Pankhurst published articles and poems by the Jamaican Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay. McKay’s articles in the Dreadnought documented working conditions for black as well as white workers in London’s docks, examined black members’ roles and treatment within the British radical Left, and aggregated the press coverage of communism globally. McKay’s biographers have examined the articles and his relationship with Pankhurst in the context of his political career. About the poems, however, the biographies are largely silent. The twelve poems McKay wrote for the Dreadnought deserve consideration within the context of poetic modernism. They invite us to ask what difference their publication in this specific venue makes to McKay’s positioning within the modernist canon. Specifically, placing these poems hypothetically within modernism invites us to theorize more fully the contributions radical journals like The Dreadnought, and editors like Pankhurst, made to the production of literary modernism. I argue that to consider figures like Pankhurst and McKay as specifically modernist collaborators challenges geographic and political accounts of how and where modernist production emerged in London, and offers a transatlantic model of modernism that, routed through Russia and the East End, reconfigures the current view of modernist networks.
• Brown, S. J. (2017). An “Insult to Soldier’s Wives and Mothers”: The Woman’s Dreadnought’s Campaign against Surveillance on the Home Front, 1914-1915. Journal of Modernist Periodical Studies, 7(1-2), 121-162. doi:10.5325/jmodeperistud.7.1-2.0121
• Brown, S. J. (2017). “Too recent to be innocuous”: An Interwar View of Women’s Suffrage in Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s The Call. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 36(1), 25-73.
• Brown, S. (2016). Female Citizenship, Independence, and Consent in Joseph Conrad’s _The Secret Agent_. Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
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  Journal article that examines historical criteria for citizenship in Britain and how Conrad's novel mobilizes the ideas of independence and consent to imply that these traditional criteria disqualify women from citizenship.
• Brown, S. (2015). Ulysses' Impossible Citizens. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.
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  Article that examines representations of citizenship in James Joyce's _Ulysses_ in the context of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereignty.

Presentations

• Brown, S. (2019, April). Mobilizing Genre in Surveillance Literature. American Comparative Literature Association Conference. Georgetown University: American Comparative Literature Association.
• Brown, S. (2019, June). Troubled Modernist Masculinity. British Association of Modernist Studies Conference. King's College London (UK): British Association of Modernist Studies.
• Brown, S. (2019, October). Finding Whiteness in Virginia Woolf (Seminar Paper: Inaugural MSA Whiteness Seminar). Modernist Studies Association Conference. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association.
• Brown, S. (2019, October). Not Yet Paranoid, Not Yet Dystopian. Modernist Studies Association Conference. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association.
• Brown, S. (2018, Fall). Network, Hierarchy, Whole: Suffrage Activism in the Surveillant City. Modernist Studies Association Conference. Columbus, OH: Modernist Studies Association.
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  Conference Paper
• Brown, S. (2018, Fall). Suffrage and the Surveillant Assemblage. Modernist Studies Association. Columbus, OH: Modernist Studies Association.
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  Seminar paper
• Brown, S. (2018, June). Why Surveillance Studies Needs Humanist Methodologies. Surveillance and Society Network Conference. Aarhus, Denmark: University of Aarhus, Surveillance and Society Network.
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  Conference talk
• Brown, S. (2018, May). 20s Feminism in the Archives: Scholarly Editions and Feminist Recovery Work Today. Historicizing Modernism/Modernist Archives. York, UK: University of York.
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  Invited talk
• Brown, S. J. (2017, April). Boundaries of Modernity in London's East End. Convergences Series at University of Arizona. Tucson: English Department, University of Arizona.
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  30 minute talk in the English Department Convergences Series on representations of the London docklands in journalism and essays by modernist authors Claude McKay and Virginia Woolf.
• Brown, S. J. (2017, June). “Amplifying Working Women’s Voices: Journalism as Cooperation.”. International Centre for Victorian Women Writers Conference: The 1900s and 1910s. Canterbury, UK: International Centre for Victorian Women Writers.
• Brown, S. (2016, June). Surveillance on the Home Front: Sailors and Soldier’s Wives in World War I. Space Between Annual Conference: Under Surveillance in the Space Between, 1914-1945. Montreal, Canada: McGill University.
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  Abstract: In the winter of 1914-15, Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought ran a series of articles protesting the Metropolitan Police’s efforts to surveil the wives of sailors and soldiers on active duty. This surveillance aimed to allow the government to revoke the separation allowances paid to wives if they were found to be “badly behaved” (a nebulous set of criteria that might include sending their children to school dirty, drinking, or having male visitors in their homes). This was every bit as ignominious as it sounds. At the beginning of the way, many of these women already found their families on the brink of starvation because of wartime food profiteering, the high initial equipment costs faced by soldiers who enlisted, and alarmingly high rates of female unemployment early in the war. These women were then forced to worry about being stripped of their only access to their husbands’ wages, or being blackmailed by the officers in charge of inquiries into their behavior. (Police corruption and brutality was widespread in the East End, and blackmail was a common danger.)As a veteran of the militant women’s suffrage movement, Pankhurst was no stranger to surveillance. (Her home office file, which includes minute details of how police detectives tracked her during her suffrage and later communist activism, runs to hundreds of pages.) Because Pankhurst lived and worked in the East End, her awareness of the likely repercussions of this surveillance was heightened, and the campaign she ran to bring it to public attention drew on her knowledge of the mechanisms of surveillance and its effects on working-class women who became the object of police scrutiny. My talk will outline the extent of the surveillance and assess Pankhurst’s efficacy in publicizing, and politicizing, the issue in the Dreadnought.
• Brown, S. (2016, October). Touring the Docklands: East End Geography in McKay and Woolf. Western Conference on British Studies. Phoenix, AZ: Arizona State University.
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  Abstract: “Down in the docks one sees things in their crudity, their bulk, their enormity.” So Virginia Woolf asserts in The London Scene, her six-essay tour of modernist London written for Good Housekeeping in 1931. Her characterization of the docklands is in keeping with a modernist rendering of London in which the docks figure as a literal no-man’s (or at least no-artist’s) land, outside the bounds of aesthetic production. In “The Docks of London” (the first essay in The London Scene), the human presence is remarkably minimal, and liminal: it is commodities, not humans, that are registered by Woolf’s rhetorical “we” as they circulate in, and head westward from, the docks. Woolf’s erasure of people marks the docks as a constitutive outside to her consideration of modernist subjectivity. Happily, unlike the readers of Good Housekeeping, Woolf need not be readers’ only guide to the docks; in fact, she is not even the only modernist guide to this particular London scene. Eleven years earlier, the Jamaican writer Claude McKay’s work as a poet and journalist for the East End weekly Worker’s Dreadnaught offered a very different perspective on the docks and their inhabitants. McKay’s work for The Worker’s Dreadnought during 1920 offers the possibility of an entirely different geography of “outsider modernism” in London, one that included editorial explorations of the dockworkers’ lives. My talk reads McKay and Woolf’s “dock aesthetics” in an antagonistic relationship to one another. Doing so identifies the docks as one space in which an ongoing struggle over what (and who) constituted the inside and outside of London’s modernism was staged over the course of the 20s and early 30s.
• Brown, S. (2015, April). The Protestor’s Body: Female Suffrage Activism as a Site of Class Conflict. Open Embodiments:. Tucson: Somatechnics.
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  Conference presentation on how issues of social class affected clashes between activists in the British women's suffrage movement and the metropolitan police between 1905 and 1914
• Brown, S. (2015, June). Unlikely Interlocutors for Modernism: Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Workman’s Dreadnought and the Poems of Claude McKay. Modernism and Collaboration. Lugano, Switzerland: Franklin University.
• Brown, S. (2015, November). Negotiating Untimely Needs: Alternative Feminisms in the 1920s. Modernist Studies Association. Boston, MA: Modernist Studies Association, Boston University, College of the Holy Cross.
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  Seminar paper on Post-World-War-I shift away from equality feminism in Britain.
• Brown, S. (2014, May). Negotiating Queer Desire in The Voyage Out. Writing the World: The 24th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Chicago: Loyola University Chicago, Northern Illinois University.
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  Conference paper on Virginia Woolf's _The Voyage Out_