Matthew Eatough

Candidate statement

I have been an active member of the MSA since 2008, over which span I have attended numerous MSA conferences, organized panels and seminars, and acted as a member of the steering committee for the cancelled 2020 conference in Brooklyn. My scholarship focuses on finance, economics, and their connections to various postcolonial modernisms across Europe, Africa, and beyond. I have pursued these intersections in a number of different contexts, from world-systems analyses of Anglo-Irish modernism and studies of how business planning methodologies have influenced African science fiction to, more recently, examinations of how nonprofit culture institutes have financed translations of neomodernist fiction for small-press publishers. At Baruch College, I have served for the past 5 years as chair of the Global Studies program (among other administrative posts). This commitment to globalizing the teaching and study of modernism has been reflected in my work with the MSA, which has sought to introduce spaces for conversations about non-Western modernisms (in the form of panels, seminars, and roundtables). It is also a commitment that I would hope to bring with me to my work as Treasurer for the MSA.
Relevant Publications:
---. “Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.1 (2012): 69-94.
---. “Philology Contra Modernism: Translating Izibongo in Johannesburg,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus Volume 3, Cycle 3 (August 20, 2018). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/philology-contra
---. “The Critic as Modernist: Es'kia Mphahlele's Cold War Literary Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 50.3 (2019): 136-156.
---. “How a Canon Is Formed: Censorship, Modernism, and the US Reception of Irish and South African Literature.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23.1 (2020): 120-43