About the Modernist Journals Project (MJP)

The MJP is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published. With magazines at its core, the MJP also offers a range of genres that extends to the digital publication of books directly connected to modernist periodicals and other supporting materials for periodical study.

We end at 1922 for both intellectual and practical reasons: the practical reason is that copyright becomes an issue with publications from 1923 onward; the intellectual reason is that most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922, a date marked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We believe the materials on the MJP will show how essential magazines were to modernism's rise.

History

The MJP began in 1995 at Brown University, with funding from the University and small local grants, as a website of digital editions of periodicals connected to the rise of modernism in the English-speaking world. Our first major project began in 1996: a digital edition of The New Age, a British weekly magazine edited by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922. In the course of preparing this edition, the MJP generated various supporting materials, including essays on contributors to the magazine, historical introductions to each six-month volume, and biographical sketches of over a thousand artists mentioned in the magazine, along with images of their work. Our edition of The New Age was completed, with the aid of a grant from the NEH, in 2004.

The University of Tulsa joined the MJP in 2003. Using copies in Tulsa's McFarlin Library, we were able to add Dana, an Irish magazine of 1904-1905 best known for first publishing James Joyce, to our digital archive in 2005. In that same year, the MJP redesigned its technological infrastructure from scratch, both to accommodate growth and to bring its materials and methods into conformance with the best practices of the digital library community. At the same time, in response to requests from members of the Modernist Studies Association, the MJP added a digital edition of the well-known Vorticist magazine, Blast, based on copies in the McFarlin Library. The MJP's website was also redesigned from the ground up, producing a data-driven, standards-compliant interface to the MJP's resources.

Current and Future Projects

During the current academic year (2008-2009) the MJP has added a run of Poetry magazine, from 1912 through 1922, and The English Review for the period when Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer) edited it, from 1908 to 1910.

We are now at work on a digital edition of Scribner's magazine from 1910 through 1922.

In the near future we hope to improve our search engine to offer more options, and to expand and improve the teaching section of our site.

We are also offering a database of magazines published between 1890 and 1922 that provides information about hundreds of periodicals, ranging from tiny "ephemeral bibelots" to giant mass magazines.

Staff

Our permanent staff includes Robert Scholes and Sean Latham, directors of the MJP at Brown and Tulsa, respectively; Clifford Wulfman, Technical Director of the MJP; and Mark Gaipa, Project Manager of the site at Brown. Robert Scholes is a senior scholar of modernism, whose work is widely known. He was President of the Modern Language Association in 2004. Sean Latham, a former Project Manager of the MJP at Brown, is now Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly at Tulsa, an Associate Professor of English there, and the author of books and articles on modernist literature and humanities computing. He hosted the meeting of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) at Tulsa in October, 2006 and will become President of the MSA in 2008. Clifford Wulfman holds a PhD from Yale University in modern literature and an MS in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Research Associate at the Perseus Project at Tufts University before coming to Brown, and has published and lectured extensively on modernist literature and humanities computing. In 2005 he completely redesigned the MJP web pages and integrated our work more closely with both the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown and the Center for Digital Initiatives in the Brown Library. He is currently the Coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives at Princeton University. Mark Gaipa holds a PhD from Brown in modern literature, has published on modernism, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy, and has taught at Harvard University as well as the Universities of Freiburg and Stuttgart in Germany. These four faculty members are assisted by graduate and undergraduate students at Tulsa and Brown.

Advisors

The MJP has a distinguished international Board of Advisors, whose members are consulted about the projects we should undertake and about improvements in our web site:

• Ann Ardis, Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Delaware, author of Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 and other works on modernism
• Peter Brooker, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, author of Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism and other works on modernism
• Maria DiBattista, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, author of High and Low Moderns: British Literature and Culture 1889-1939 and other works on modernism
• Brad Evans, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920
• Michael Groden, Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, author of "Ulysses" in Progress and other works on modernism
• Wallace Martin, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toledo, author of "The New Age" Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History and other works on modernism
• Mark Morrison, Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, author of The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920
• Robert Spoo, Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, San Francisco, former editor of The James Joyce Quarterly and now copyright advisor to the MJP
• Martha S. Vogeler, Professor Emeritus in the Departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at California State University, Fullerton, author of Frederic Harrison: The Vocations of a Positivist and other works on late Victorian and modern subjects
• Robert von Hallberg, Helen A. Regenstein Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, author of American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 and other works on modern poetry

Tulsa Advisory Board

• D. Thomas Benediktson, Professor of Classics and Dean of Arts and Sciences
• Marc Carlson, Interim Head of Special Collections, McFarlin Library
• George Gilpin, Professor of English and McFarlin Library Scholar-in-Residence

Brown Advisory Board

• Paul Armstrong, Professor of English
• Stuart Burrows, Associate Professor of English
• Rosemary Cullen, Senior Scholarly Resources Librarian
• Mark Gaipa, MJP Manager
• Harriette Hemmasi, University Librarian
• Tamar Katz, Associate Professor of English
• Ravit Reichman, Robert and Nancy Carney Assistant Professor of English
• Robert Scholes, MJP Co-Director
• Patrick Yott, Leader, Digital Services Department, Library

Usage

Since the MJP opened its web site in 2003, its usage has increased steadily. As additional resources are added, we expect the number of people using this site to increase dramatically.

Contact

MJP_Project_Manager at brown.edu (replace "at" with @)