The New Zealand Modernist Studies Consortium (NZMSC) invites applications for its 2025 symposium, which is to be held at the University of Otago, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, in Ōtepoti Dunedin on Monday 24 November 2025.

NZMSC is a network designed to bring together Aotearoa New Zealand scholars of modernist literature, arts, and culture to share work and ideas. We take a broad view of modernism as encompassing the innovations in literature, the arts, and culture that characterized the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and the extension of these innovations in the art and culture of the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first.

Our goal is to encourage research and publication in the burgeoning field of modernist studies and to provide a forum for interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts across the different Aotearoa New Zealand university campuses. To this end, the NZMSC has for the past decade been running symposia focused on workshopping writing in progress.

For this year’s symposium, we offer two forms of presentation. Firstly, as in our previous meetings, we seek draft papers, chapters, and book proposals for circulation in advance and discussion in our workshop sessions. Secondly, we also seek proposals for papers to be presented orally in our seminar session.

If you would like to workshop a piece of your own work-in-progress at this session, please email NZMSC’s co-conveners, Erin Carlston and Jacob Edmond, indicating your interest by Monday, 13 October. If you would like to present a paper in our seminar session, please email us an abstract of no more than 250 words by the same deadline.

Even if you choose not to present work, you are more than welcome to attend the symposium. The NZMSC is open to academics, independent scholars, and postgraduate students working on any aspect of modernism, broadly defined. To register for the symposium, contact the co-conveners.

Participation in the NZMSC symposium is free of charge. Out-of-town participants will be expected to cover their own costs of travel and accommodation.

 

Erin G. Carlston

e.carlston@auckland.ac.nz

English, Writing Studies, and Drama

University of Auckland

Jacob Edmond

jacob.edmond@otago.ac.nz

English and Linguistics

University of Otago