About
Greetings! I’m an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. I teach courses on modern and contemporary British/Irish literature and visual culture and am particularly interested in the shared evolution of British art and literary history in the recent century. As a result, my research asks how distinctions emerged between fine art and craft, folk, and urban forms. At the same time, I look closely at how those distinctions disintegrate at particular moments and in particular places. In thinking about the development of artistic media and processes (i.e. sculpture, assemblage, manual photography, etc.) alongside the emergence of new literary forms and techniques, my research investigates textual production in both aesthetic and practical registers. In my book project, Crafting Modernity, I explore the history of art and craft media as an important site of social critique in 20th-21st century literature from the U.K. and Caribbean. This work historicizes art-making as it intersects with new technologies, literary experimentation, post-colonial identity, human rights, and feminist critique. I also examine the role of archives and hybrid texts with an eye to preservation, transnational circulation, and gendered visual histories.
Contact Information
aelkins@macalester.edu
Twitter
Macalester Faculty Page
Site Image Credit: All header images on this website are woodcuts by Margaret Preston. For more information on Preston’s life and work, visit http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/margaret-preston
