Wyndham Lewis

Much of my professional research activity is concerned with the life and work of the controversial polymath Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), a modernist painter and writer who was also a First World War combatant. 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. My main efforts in this area are as follows:

The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis
Alongside Scott W. Klein, I’m Co-General Editor of The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: a 43-volume scholarly edition of Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction published by Oxford University Press. Scott and I are continuing the work done throughout the project's first decade by the Founding General Editor, Paul Edwards, who is firmly involved with the edition for the foreseeable future as he continues to oversee the volumes already progressed to near-completion under his editorship. I’m co-editing Lewis’s novel Snooty Baronet (1932) with Andrzej Gasiorek as part of the Oxford Collected Works.

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. My aim is to finish this project by the end of 2025.