Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture

The Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture (MACLAC) research cluster is based within the Department of English, University of Sydney. It is made up of research-active academic staff and students at all levels who are preoccupied with issues arising from the literary and cultural efflorescence of the previous and current centuries.

It is designed to foster and enhance the research skills, potentials and productivity of all its members. We represent a major concentration of expertise and productivity in this area, regularly publishing books and articles in high quality venues, addressing international conferences, securing competitive grants and fellowships, and producing successful research theses.

Through frequent meetings, the occasional visitor, and discussion of current projects, we consolidate our considerable strengths and seek to create durable intellectual networks at home and abroad.

A short selection of research topics currently being pursued (individually or collaboratively) by members:

• True crime fiction in cultural history;
• The interrelations of cinema and literature in an early twentieth-century media ecology;
• Surveillance and screen culture;
• Digital edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos;
• T. S. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism;
• Modernism and masculinity;
• William Faulkner, film, and the category of the Event;
• Library Scenarios;
• William Maxwell and The New Yorker C20th American epic: John Dos Passos;
• Iain Sinclair’s aesthetics;
• Revisions of the ‘underground man’ in Ellison and DeLillo;
• Disappearing Acts: On the Limits of American Exceptionalism.

Please contact us

Please contact us if you would like to learn more, and even potentially join this exciting research cluster at the University of Sydney. Whether you are an established academic researcher, a postdoctoral or ‘early career’ researcher interested in a Fellowship at Sydney, or interested in pursuing graduate or Honours work in any field falling under our general rubric, we want to hear from you.

Get in touch with Dr Julian Murphet to find out more about how MACLAC can help you.