Wyndham Lewis

Much of my professional research activity is concerned with the controversial modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). I’m a Trustee of the Wyndham Lewis Estate (the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust), a registered charity which promotes the study and preservation of Lewis’s output, and between 2010 and 2018 I was a co-editor of The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies. I’ve published edited collections of essays on Lewis, and he’s featured prominently in two of my books: Modernist Nowheres and Moonlighting. Alongside my role as a member of the Editorial Board of the Wyndham Lewis Complete Critical Edition, commissioned by Oxford University Press, I’m working on several things to do with Lewis—including essays on one of his hitherto-uncatalogued drawings and on Vorticism’s reception in the 1920s. I’m also taking very small steps towards writing a (short) Lewis biography. Currently, my main efforts in this area are:

Wyndham Lewis and his Age: Fascism, Apology, and Rehabilitation
This project, which was funded in the 2022-23 academic year by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, investigates how Lewis’s so-called ‘flirtation’ with fascism in the 1930s tarnished his reputation and generated his contrite, anti-fascist writings of the late 1930s into the 1940s and 1950s. These late-career texts are almost entirely unknown, and Lewis remains unappreciated as a radical critic of authority. Because he thought he was a victim of what we would now call cancel culture, Lewis offers a fascinating case study for thinking in a scholarly way about not only the limits of political apology and the consequences, perceived and real, of alleged de-platforming, but also the idea of political rehabilitation. The project’s main scholarly output will be a book-length study of Lewis’s attraction to and apologetic retreat from fascist politics, contracted to Princeton University Press.

Edition of Lewis’s Snooty Baronet
My other main Lewis-focused project is a scholarly edition of his little-read 1932 novel Snooty Baronet, which I’m co-editing with Andrzej Gasiorek as part of the Oxford University Press Complete Critical Edition of Lewis.