Dr Georgina Colby
I am a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the School of Humanities.
Prior to joining the University of Westminster, I was a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London for a number of years. I have also taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London and the University of Cambridge. I hold a BA, MA, and PhD in English from Royal Holloway, University of London.
From 2016-2021, I was the Course Leader for the MA English Literature: Modern and Contemporary Fictions.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
The majority of my work focuses on avant-garde writing, with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary feminist poetry and poetics, forms of aesthetic resistance and solidarity, and the politics of avant-garde textual practice.
My current monograph in progress concerns the relation between feminist avant-garde poetics, representation, and aesthetic spaces of social justice. An article on the work of Bhanu Kapil related to this monograph has recently been published in Contemporary Literature.
In 2018 I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for the project Feminist Representations: Sexual Violence Against Women, Asylum and Testimony (2016-2021). The project, a collaboration with Jane Freedman, aims to explore the contribution the arts and humanities may make to address institutional failures in the area of gendered violence against women and girls, with a specific focus asylum, translation, voice and testimony. We edited a collection of essays related to this project, Representing Violence Against Women: Asylum, Voice and Testimony, forthcoming in the Proceedings of the British Academy series. The book, and the project from which the book emerged, addresses the obstacles that women encounter when relaying their testimonies that involve violence in the asylum process. It centres first-hand accounts of the asylum processes by women survivors and activists and offers examples of how the arts and humanities might open up avenues of expression and testimony for women seeking asylum, creating safe spaces for women to talk about their lived experiences of violence and exile but also, and crucially, resistance and resilience. I am currently the UK Partner on the ERC-GRABS (Growing Up Across Borders) project, led by Professor Jane Freedman, and the project's Arts and Humanities lead.
I am founder and the Series Editor of two series published by Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing, and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing (both co-edited with Eric White). I am the editor of two volumes in the Foundations series, Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen (EUP, 2023) and Lyn Hejinian, The Proposition: Uncollected Early Poems 1963-1983 (EUP, 2024).
To date, much of my research has focused on the work of Kathy Acker. Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) positions Acker as a key figure in the American avant-garde, and a pioneer of contemporary experimental writing. Through archival research I trace the stages in Acker's writing from early poetic exercises written in the 1970s to her final writings in 1997. Each chapter focuses on a particular compositional method and insists on the importance of avant-garde experiment to the process of making new modes of meaning through formal innovation. More information on my archival research at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University can be found here. I edited a collection of essays titled Reading Experimental Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) that explored the importance of avant-garde writing today.
I have a particular interest in the publishing practices and literary politics of small presses, specifically the way in which these intersect with avant-garde aesthetics. With Leigh Wilson (PI), I am co-investigator of the Arts Council funded project The Contemporary Small Press. We published a volume related to this project titled The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2020).
I am the Reviews Editor for New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics.