Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Gail McDonald

BA, Special Honors in English; University of Texas; MA and PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Previous positions:  University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University of Southampton; appointed Goldsmiths 2011

Teaching

Convenor, 'The Emergence of Modern America' and 'Further Studies in American Literature and Culture'; I also teach on 'Inventing the Nation', 'Modern American Fiction' and (at MA-level) 'American Literature and Culture: Theoretical and Critical Concepts'

Areas of supervision

• Late-19th and 20th-century American literature and culture
• Modernist poetry
• Anglo-American modernism

Grants & awards

• Funded residency, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, September 2009
• Working group on American Literature and Religion, sponsored by the Pew Foundation and the University of Notre Dame, 2001-2004
• Pew Foundation Research Fellowship, 1999-2000
• Honorable Mention, Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities for Learning to be Modern, awarded by the U. S. Council of Graduate Schools, 1997
• Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society

Professional activities

• Founder and Past President, Modernist Studies Association
• Organising committee, London Modernism Seminar, 2007-2010
• Chair, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Committee, 2008
• Reader of manuscripts and proposals for Oxford UP, Blackwell, Edinburgh UP, Modernism/Modernity, Paideuma

Papers presented

• 'Eliot and Intellectual Humility,' Invited speaker, T. S. Eliot International Summer School, East Coker, July 2009 and July 2010
• 'Heimlich Maneuvers: The Rietveld-Schröder House and Progressivism,' Modernist Studies Association, Montreal, November 2009
• 'Imaginary Nations: Modernism and Cosmopolitanism,' Plenary Speaker, Atlantic World Research Network of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 2009
• 'The Future of English Studies,' CCUE Annual Meeting, London, November 2007
• 'Modernism and Domesticity: The Example of Cather's The Professor's House,' London Modernism Seminar, March 2007

Research interests

Representations of agency in late-19th and early 20th-century American writing; modernism and domestic architecture; 20th-century educational theory and practice; modernist poetry. Currently working on a monograph entitled Collaborative Sin: American Naturalism and the Languages of Responsibility.

Selected publications

Books

American Literature and Culture, 1900-1960. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)

Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)

Edited Books

Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, co-edited with David Chinitz (Forthcoming, Winter 2013)

Articles

'American Scholars: Pound and Emerson' in Pound and Education, edited by Steven Yao and Michael Coyle (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, forthcoming).

'Eliot and the New Critics' in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by David Chinitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 411-422.

'A Homemade Heaven: Modernist Poetry and the Social Gospel' in There Before Us: Religion, Literature, and Culture from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Wendell Berry, edited by Roger Lundin (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), pp.194-215.

'Product Placement: Literary Modernism and "Crisco"', Modernist Cultures, 2 (1) Summer 2006, pp. 21-30.

'Through Schoolhouse Windows: Women, the Academy, and T.S. Eliot' in Gender, Sexuality and Desire in T. S. Eliot, edited by Cassandra Laity and Nancy Gish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 177-94.

Entries on 'Personal Education' and 'Philosophy of Education' in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, edited by Stephen J. Adams and Demetres Tryphonopoulos. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004)

'Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty', Pedagogy, 2 (1) Winter 2002, pp. 17-30.

'The Mind a Department Store: Reconfiguring Space in the Gilded Age,' Modern Language Quarterly, 63 (2) June 2002, pp. 227-249.

'Sentimental Education: Randall Jarrell Among the Women,' Modernism/Modernity, 5 (1) January 1998, pp. 1-21.