Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing (CMCW)
Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing (CMCW)

Our activities

Explore CMCW's programme of activities

We host a range of activities and events, bringing staff, postgraduates and undergraduates together for panels, roundtables and performances. 

Annual research day

The Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing (CMCW) hosted its annual symposium in April on the theme of Shortness. 

Colleagues were invited to characterise the subject however they liked: being less-than vertical; demonstrating brevity and speed; behaving in a manner considered to be clipped, tart or abrupt. Presentations included readings on abbreviation, fleeting figures, flirtatious glances, decolonial sound, sculptural performance, and the brevity of fiction and play. 

We closed with a panel on pathologies of writing, led by Siddharth Soni (Univ. of Southampton) and Eliza Haughton-Shaw (Univ. of Cambridge), and a keynote presentation by Kanupriya Dhingra (SOAS, Univ. of London) on the parallel booksellers of Old Delhi. 

Mind Sweeps 

CMCW was also honoured to feature Professor Sara Crangle (Univ. of Sussex) as part of its Mind Sweeps series focusing on decolonial world literature. You can watch a recording of the talk, titled "Fierce Intimacies: Black Avant-Gardes and Gender", below.

Workshop Series - Reframing GenAI

This interdisciplinary workshop series is funded by the English ECC and PGR Research Culture Development Fund. It is the result of collaborative efforts between the Department of English, the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing, and Digital Humanities.

The workshops are facilitated by Sam Pegg, a postgraduate researcher in the Department of English. The aim is to reframe creative-critical dialogues in research for PGRs and ECCs across the Humanities.

Split across three workshops, this series looked at two central tenets:

  1. Recognising GenAI within Humanities Scholarship and the very real and emotional responses it evokes within research.
  2. Exploring the implications of GenAI on criticality and creativity within Humanities scholarship.

Topics covered during these workshops included, but are not limited to:

  • emotional responses to GenAI
  • GenAI's placement within Humanities research
  • threats and opportunities of embedding GenAI in research
  • methods towards GenAI collaboration/co-creation in research

The first iteration of this series happened between May and June 2025, with plans to expand it over the coming years.