Georgina Colby

The majority of my work focuses on avant-garde writing, with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary feminist writing, and avant-garde textual practice. I am interested in the way in which examining the archives of avant-garde writers can inform an understanding of the process of innovation and experimental composition. These research interests underpin my recent monograph, Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which positions Acker as a key figure in the American avant-garde, and a pioneer of contemporary experimental writing. Through archival research I trace the stages in Acker's writing from her early poetic exercises written in the 1970s to her final writings in 1997. Each chapter focuses on a particular compositional method and insists on the importance of avant-garde experiment to the process of making new modes of meaning through formal innovation. More information on my archival research at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University can be found here. I am currently working on an edited collection, Reading Experimental Writing for Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2019.

My wider research interests concern the relation between literary experiment, representation and social justice. In 2018 I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for the project Feminist Representations: Sexual Violence Against Women, Asylum and Testimony. The project aims to explore the contribution the arts and humanities may make to address institutional failures in the area of sexual violence against women and girls, with a specific focus asylum, translation, voice and testimony.

The relation between experiment with form and language and voicing contemporary socio-political concerns underpins my current monograph in progress, Forms of Solidarity: Feminist Avant-Garde Writing in the Twenty-First Century.  The book addresses the relations between avant-garde women's writing, political solidarity and feminist activisms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I am the Founder and Director of  S A L O N, a site for reading and responding to the present through experimental women's writing, which was established at Westminster in 2016. A collaboration with Susan Rudy, S A L O N is hosted by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, and Queen Mary

With Leigh Wilson (PI), I am co-investigator of the Arts Council funded project The Contemporary Small Press. We are currently editing a volume related to this project title The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

I am the Reviews Editor for New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics and an Associate Editor of Refugees and Conflict, a speciality section of the open access journal Frontiers in Human Dynamics.