Irina Rasmussen Associate Professor (Docent)

Irina Rasmussen is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, Stockholm University. She is a specialist in British modernism, with sub-specialties in American, Irish, and Russian modernisms, the history of aesthetics, dialectical materialism, and modern world literatures in English from the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. She will be happy to supervise students in the main areas of her expertise, but also in literary theory, and more specifically, in cultural, postcolonial, and world-literature criticisms.

Her book manuscript, James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Historical Record, elucidates the interaction of Joyce’s aesthetic modernism with forms of nationalism and internationalism. It explores how the novel’s alignment with the historical avant-garde serves as the condition of its complex negotiations between Ireland’s colonial legacy and its nationalist imagination.

Her nearly completed book manuscript, “Documentary Modernism: World Sympathies, Ideal Collectivities, and Dissenting Individualism,” explores collaborative interventionist modernist projects: the modes of reading they invite, the values they generate, and the worlds they project. It maps the complex ways the modernist imagination of the 1920s and 1930s migrates to a culturally diverse imaginary, sometimes enabling radically new world-conceptions. The project builds on the established methodological merger between new historicist and intermedial critical practice, supplemented with current world-making theory.

She is currently working on a book project, “Vernacular Modernisms: Poetics of the World,” which examines experimental modernist poetics of Acmeists and Imagists, of Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway in the context of their conceptualizations of literary production. Bearing in mind modernism’s double identity as concept- and praxis-oriented, the questions this study asks are: what happens in the encounter between modernism's studied form and vernacular material; what possibilities such a dualism opens; and what elisions it might perform. The larger focus is on how the wrapping of immediate and distant vernacular materials into artistic practices helped the modernists to spawn new expressive forms.

Her articles and reviews appeared in James Joyce Broadsheet, James Joyce Quarterly, and in Modernism/modernity.

Please contact irina.rasmussen@english.su.se if you are interested in Degree Thesis supervision.