Call for papers
The Internet is a significant yet leaky infrastructure by which modernism circulates. Members of the public often encounter modernist literature and culture online, while students and scholars depend on the World Wide Web for conducting and disseminating their research. Worryingly, Internet assets are unstable—meaning that one crucial infrastructure of Modernist Studies is at risk. The Pew Research Center reports that “38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later,” while librarians and digital humanists like Constance Crompton, Robin Camille Davis, Johanna Drucker, Rick Furuta, Bethanie Nowviskie, Jessica Otis, Luis Meneses, and Dot Porter are sounding alarms about the disappearance of digital humanities projects.
But modernist scholars should not rely on the work of librarians and tech professionals to preserve the resources we need. Our disciplinary history and indispensable resources for teaching and research are at risk. These include early literature websites of the 1990s and first decade of the twentieth century made by amateurs or scholars, social media posts of the Web 2.0 era, capacious archives or electronic libraries meant to collect e-texts, remediations of modernist texts that are legible as scholarly editions, or digital initiatives that would fit under a “digital humanities” umbrella. All of them are a part of disciplinary history, yet all are vulnerable.
This proposed edited collection, “A Field Guide to Lost Modernisms,” seeks to 1) create awareness around this problem by providing powerful examples of these losses, 2) identify some of the major causes behind these losses, and 3) brainstorm ideas about how to solve this massive problem with the leaky infrastructures of modernist scholarship. A publisher has already expressed formal interest in the project, and money has been secured to publish it Gold Open Access. This collection aims to be a quick, piquant, and eclectic collection, an attention-grabbing call-to-arms that tempers anxieties about unstable futures with feasible and/or experimental approaches to preservation.
As a field guide, this collection aims to give the sense, powerfully, of something that is real to be seen and recognized, something to be described and studied for its structure and morphology, to be classified as a genre whose patterns may be reconstructed. Contributions will help its readers “spot” at-risk assets in the wild—that is, on the Internet, in the Wayback Machine, locked inside a floppy disk or thumb drive, or only in one’s memory, a gap where a resource used to be. It does not aim to be complete or timeless, but an urgent, strategic set of case studies to be appreciated and methodologies to be emulated. Vivid accounts of at-risk or barely recovered sites of modernism would, in themselves, also mitigate loss in cases where description and documentation become advocacy.
While traditional essays of 7,000-8,000 words are welcome, contributors are even more welcome to suit their contributions to their own particular aims and peculiar sites for recovery or documentation. Experimental scholarly genres are encouraged, as are short, manifesto-like contributions. A Web Companion will be purpose-built to accommodate (within reason) datasets, code, images or other materials that contributors wish to preserve.
Types of contributions may include:
Case studies of individual websites or other electronic resources related to modernist studies, devoted to reconstructing and describing a lost or at-risk artifact in the manner of an elegy or a scholarly introduction
A first-person postmortem of a digital project or artifact that the contributor personally worked on or encountered in a unique or intimate way
A taxonomical identification, classification, or definition of a particular type or genre of lost modernisms, accompanied by snapshots or descriptions of multiple exemplars
Historical and/or causal analysis about the cause of these losses or the future of this trend toward broken sites
Histories of pre-digital “lost modernisms” that investigate other, likely non-electronic kinds of modernisms lost before 1991, put into the context of digital loss or contemporary fears about the Internet as an unstable infrastructure
Persuasive arguments about the value of digital scholarship and/or public representations of modernism online
Methodological recommendations for approaching preservation
Practical guides on specific strategies and processes preserving or otherwise testifying to lost modernisms (step-by-step how-tos, tutorials, or considerations of the pros and cons of using specific software or approaches to preservation)
Theoretical treatises defining the “lost,” “digital modernism,” “preservation,” or another key term in the collection, or theoretical explorations of the relationship between digital materiality and modernist textuality
To participate, send an abstract (250-300 words, but longer is fine if you wish) and a brief biography (paragraph-long) via this online form by Monday, February 2, 2026. Details about the length, style, structure, and format of individual contributions will be negotiated once the full slate of contributions comes into view so that an eclectic but harmonious and effective whole may be shaped.