The British Modernities Group

The British Modernities Group was established in 2005 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to spur critical discussion in British studies across period boundaries. It discusses recent scholarship, workshops group members’ original work, and organizes an annual graduate student conference. Each semester, the BMG explores wide-ranging critical topics, including transatlanticism, modernity, embodiment, and imperialism.  As a student-run group, we strive to create an informal setting in which faculty and graduate students can meet and share information.

Our 2017-18 theme will be “Stranger Things: The Weird, the Paranormal, and the Problem of Belief.” Some questions we hope to reflect on include: How do encounters with the Weird and/or paranormal manage to inspire both horror and pleasure? How should we as readers account for the beliefs of an author, or the beliefs we ourselves bring to a work of art? Following Marx and Derrida, what sort of spectres haunt contemporary society? How might attending to stranger things help us imagine, and possibly create, alternate futures? What do we do with the Weird—and what does the Weird do to us?