Braddock

Assistant professor of English Jeremy Braddock provides a fresh perspective on the making of modernism in his new book, "Collecting as Modernist Practice" (Johns Hopkins University Press), exploring the importance of the art collection, the anthology and the archive as collective forms of modernist expression.

Centered on the collector and the practice of collecting, the book highlights the role that anthologies, archives and fine arts collections have played in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Braddock reveals the ways that many collections were devised as culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves, and as models for modernism's future institutionalization.

 

He conducted extensive archival research to examine the practices of American art collectors and literary editors, including Albert Barnes, Duncan Phillips, Ezra Pound, Alain Locke and Katherine Dreier.

Braddock will give a book talk, "The Material Formation of the Field: Modernism and the Archive," March 28 at 4 p.m. in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in Kroch Library.

His talk will focus on the establishment of two modernist archival collections, the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo and the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University, and the contribution that collectors and their collections have made toward defining the modernist movement.

A Q&A and book signing will follow the talk, which is free and open to the public. Information: http://booktalks.library.cornell.edu.

Braddock is also the co-editor of "Directed by Allen Smithee" (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), which examines the politics of the pseudonym in Hollywood. His articles have appeared in Art Journal, Callaloo and Modern Fiction Studies.