Future Fields: Michael Field roundtable
Thursday 27 November, Goldsmiths, University of London
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Roundtable: 18.30-19.30 (hybrid: in person and online)
Book launch: 19.30-20.00 (in person only)
Chaired by Sarah Parker (Loughborough), with Gareth Brookes (Kingston), Alex Murray (QUB), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck)
Join us for a roundtable discussion about the potential ‘future fields’ of Michael Field scholarship, followed by a celebration of the publication of Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press, September 2025). Available to order here.
Michael Field in Context, edited by Sarah Parker (Loughborough), features chapters from thirty-six contributors on different aspects of Michael Field’s lives and work, from Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s early lives and biographical foundations that led to them becoming ‘Michael Field’, through to their multifarious historical inspirations in Ancient Greece, the Renaissance and beyond, closing with their enduring influence both within their own time and in relation to contemporary theories and debates.
At the roundtable, Sarah Parker will discuss the process of putting together the volume with chapter contributors, Alex Murray (QUB) and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck). Excitingly, they will also be joined by Gareth Brookes, a graphic novelist and practice-based arts researcher currently working on a visual project inspired by Michael Field’s papers in the Bodleian archives. The evening will conclude with a reception to celebrate the publication of Michael Field in Context.
Gareth Brookes is a graphic novelist and comics scholar and lecturer in Illustration Animation at Kingston University. He has published four graphic novels, one of which, The Black Project (2013, Myriad Editions), was included in the Sélection Officielle 2018 45e Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême. He has contributed scholarship to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Studies in Comics. In 2025 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford University.
Alex Murray is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen’s University Belfast and founding co-editor of Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures (Johns Hopkins University Press). His most recent books include Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past (Oxford University Press, 2023) and with Kate Hext The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford where he is editing Conservatism and Literary Studies for Cambridge University Press and working on his fifth monograph, ‘Creativity and Critique: English Literary History at the fin de siècle’, which is funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
Sarah Parker is Professor of Literature, Sexuality and Visual Culture at Loughborough University. She is the author of Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895–1922 (Routledge, 2024) and The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity (Routledge, 2013). She is co-editor of Interrogating Lesbian Modernism (with Jana Funke and Elizabeth English, Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Michael Field, For That Moment Only and Other Prose Works (with Alex Murray, MHRA, 2022), and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (with Ana Parejo Vadillo, Ohio University Press, 2019). She is currently working on an AHRC-funded collaborative project to mark the centenary of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.
Ana Parejo Vadillo is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include Women’s Poets and Urban Aestheticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), the co-edited volumes Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (with Marion Thain, Broadview, 2009) and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (with Sarah Parker, Ohio University Press, 2019). She is currently finishing two books, Poetry in Polygamy for Oxford University Press and the co-edited collection The Verse Dramas of Michael Field (with Amy Kahrmann Huseby) for Cambridge University Press.
Attendance is free and there is no need to register. If you would like to attend remotely, please email drc@gold.ac.uk
Location
Please click for a map: Location RHB 137.
RHB 137 is on the ground floor of the Richard Hoggart Building (the main building at the front of the campus), on the east side at the back
Goldsmiths is located in New Cross, South East London. It is a short walk from both New Cross Gate and New Cross stations (Zone 2) on the main rail network and London overground; about a 7 minute journey from London Bridge and 30 minutes from London Victoria. It is on bus routes 21, 36, 53, 136, 171, 172, 177, 225, 321, 343, 436, 453.
For exact directions to Goldsmiths please see the How to Find Us page on the Goldsmiths website.
For more information about these events, please email drc@gold.ac.uk.