Following on the heels of the recent modernist celebrations of 1922, 2023 marks the centenary of the publication of Mina Loy’s first collection of poems Lunar Baedecker, published in Paris by Robert McAlmon in his Contact collection. This conference aims to prompt new perspectives on Loy scholarship, paying particular attention to her networks and her presence in French artistic circles and to the French reception of her work.

Paris – 8-9 September 2023 | Sorbonne Université & Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

Argument

Following on the heels of the recent modernist celebrations of 1922, 2023 marks the centenary of the publication of Mina Loy’s first collection of poems Lunar Baedecker, published in Paris by Robert McAlmon in his Contact collection. Loy’s work is now more topical than ever, and we are witnessing an apex in Loy scholarship, with the recent publication of Mary Ann Caws’ new biography, Mina Loy: Apology of Genius (Reaktion Books, 2022), and the long-awaited exhibition of her artworks, Strangeness is Inevitable, organized at Bowdoin College in the US (April 6–September 17, 2023), marking the apogee of ten years of steadily growing scholarly interest in Loy’s œuvre.

However, despite her growing global reputation and increasing recognition in the past decades, Loy’s work still remains more marginal in France than in the English-speaking world. This is somewhat paradoxical given that it was in France that Loy spent some of her most important years, first as an art student from 1900 to 1907 and then in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Her work of the period proved extremely prolific and versatile, not only as a poet, but also as an artist and gallery agent, as well as a critical theorist of modernism with her ekphrastic poems and essays on Stein, Joyce, Brancusi, Stravinsky, Cornell, and many others.

This conference aims to prompt new perspectives on Loy scholarship, paying particular attention to her networks and her presence in French artistic circles and to the French reception of her work.

Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

• Mina Loy’s visual art, particularly material that has prompted little critical attention so far or has more recently become available
• Loy as an art critic
• intermediality and ekphrasis in Loy’s work
• questions of intertextuality and textual networks
• Loy and her transatlantic artistic networks; friendships and artistic collaborations with Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Arthur Cravan, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Oelze, Joseph Cornell, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, Wyndham Lewis…
• the reception and translation of Loy’s work, especially into French
• the role of community and its theorization
• Loy’s connections with artistic circles, particularly with French Surrealism in Paris
• Loy’s Paris lampshade shop run together with Peggy Guggenheim
• her involvement in Julien Levy’s New York Surrealist gallery in the 1930s
• the still unpublished part of Loy’s archives, such as her autobiographical prose narratives, held at the Beinecke Library
• Mina Loy, the digital humanities and innovative pedagogies

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia
• Laura Scuriatti, Bard College Berlin

Submission guidelines

The proposals in English (about 250 words), along with a short biographical note, should be sent to Yasna Bozhkova ( yasna.bozhkova@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr ) and Diane Drouin ( diane.drouin@orange.fr )

by April 15, 2023.

Scientific committee

Yasna Bozhkova (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Diane Drouin (Sorbonne Université), and Juliette Utard (Sorbonne Université).

Selected bibliography of publications on Loy in the past ten years

Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Women. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Prescott, Tara. Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016.

Kinnahan, Linda. Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets. London: Routledge, 2017.

Hayden, Sarah. Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018.

Scuriatti, Laura. Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019.

Churchill, Suzanne, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, University of Georgia, 2020.

Bozhkova, Yasna. Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2022.

Caws, Mary Ann. Mina Loy: Apology of Genius. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.

Ades, Dawn, et al., eds. Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

Churchill, Suzanne, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. Travels with Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Lever Press, 2024 (forthcoming).