{"id":10,"date":"2014-10-16T18:03:10","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T01:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jpaltin\/?page_id=10"},"modified":"2025-06-11T15:51:19","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T22:51:19","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jpaltin\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

My research pursues queries about feminist, queer, minor and collectivist performances at the intersection of literary, social, and cultural theory. My recent work analyzes verbal figurations of imagined communities, and critiques the social production of adherences and identifications. My fields include 20th<\/sup> century British, Irish and South Asian literatures in English, modernist studies, critical and cultural theory, literature and environment, literature and music, and literature and mind. My current monograph is available from Cambridge University Press under the title\u00a0 Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd<\/strong>. The project discovers a genealogy of the contemporary political multitude in literary modernism’s representations of crowds, and focuses on the crowd’s status as a strategic political articulation acting in competition with established imagined communities. It compares verbal figurations produced during the period named to models operating in the realms of psychoanalysis, political philosophy and social theory. It posits that these figurations taken together constitute a coherent, intertextualized project among a group of modernist writers which aspires to anatomize the modern crowd, to explore alternative collective forms of experience, and to imagine the crowd’s futurity. It proposes a reading of the fictional crowd that offers a fresh account of its sense of authorization and efficacy, concluding that the crowd recognizes itself as an agile network that supervises its own world-making and negotiates its material and cultural exchanges.<\/p>\n

My publications so far include:<\/p>\n

Monograph<\/p>\n