About

Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde documents Loy’s avant-garde affiliations and pursues new modes of textual and visual expression in order to invite a closer, more informed engagement with her work. This scholarly website offers a digital narratives and visualizations that contextualize and interpret Loy’s work and related artifacts. Our goals are to:  

  • provide access to and interpretations of Loy’s verbal and visual work, much of which remains buried in archives or private collections;
  • transform close reading through multimodal tools and environments that activate verbal and visual reading practices;
  • develop a crowd-sourced, flash-mob, feminist theory of the en dehors garde that accounts for the contributions of women and people of color to the avant-garde;
  • conduct an experiment in public humanities scholarship that involves scholars and students in transforming scholarly methods and products, tests new processes for peer review, and sets UX design standards for digital scholarship.

Our aim is not to create a comprehensive digital archive, but to provide a curated, multimedia, interactive platform for accessing and understanding Loy’s writing, artwork, and career. Using Loy as a case study, our project aims to broaden understanding of the diversity of avant-garde production and activate a network of interested readers and scholars. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde demonstrates how digital tools can transform humanities scholarship from the traditional model of a lone scholar writing a monograph to a team of researchers collaborating on a “multigraph”—an interactive, multi-authored, multimodal resource that sets UX design standards for DH scholarship.

We have transformed our scholarly methods and products in order to involve students, faculty, librarians, and technologists as equal partners in the production of original humanities research. Students contribute to New Frequencies as authors, coders, and creators of innovative Loy scholarship. Our UX design affords equal prominence and value to their work, while allowing for experimentation with new tools and formats for humanities research. Scholars contribute peer-reviewed chapters to  Mina Loy Baedeker: a scholarly handbook for digital travelers, which provide expert analysis of Loy’s experimental art and writing. The question of “how we read” remains central to our website design, which seeks to transform Close Readings, rendering the practice more interactive and embedded in social, material, and historical contexts.

We invite you to explore our interpretations of Loy’s work, rethink existing theories of the avant garde, and participate in the formation of a new, feminist theory of the avant-garde—what we’re call the “en dehors garde,” in order to account for artists who came from the outside and worked on the margins.

Follow Us

Twitter @DigitalMinaLoy  •  Instagram DigitalMinaLoy  •  Facebook  Digital Mina Loy

Project Architects

Suzanne W. ChurchillProfessor of English at Davidson College
Linda Kinnahan, Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh
Susan RosenbaumAssociate Professor of English at the University of Georgia

Project Advisor

Roger Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and literary executor; Executive Editor, MIT Press.

Technology & Design

Greg Lord, Lead Designer and Software Engineer, Hamilton College
Emily McGinn, Academic Professional Associate, Digital Humanities Lab, UGA
Gesina Phillips, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Duquesne University

Kristen Eshleman, Director of Digital Innovation, Davidson College
Katie Wilkes, IT Fellow, Davidson College (2014-16)
Olivia Booker, IT Fellow, Davidson College (2013-14)
Jennifer Hall Mandula, IT Fellow, Davidson College (2012-13)

Contributors

Mahalia Cooks, Fayetteville State University, class of 2019, B.A. in English
Sadie Crow, Duquesne University, M.A. student in English
Alexandra Edwards, University of Georgia, class of 2018, Ph.D. student in English
Elise Foote, Davidson College, class of 2016, B.A. in English
Meredith Foulke, Davidson College, class of 2018, B.A. in English
Sarah Gompper, Davidson College, class of 2018, B.A. in English
Jacqueline Kari, University of Georgia Ph.D. student in Creative Writing
Erin McClenathan, University of Georgia, class of 2018, Ph.D. student in Art History
Leah Mell, Davidson College, class of 2019, B.A. in English and Russian Language & Literature
Andrew Rikard, Davidson College, class of 2017, B.A. in English
Jessica Riley, University of Georgia, class of 2018, B.A. student in English
Maura Tangum, Davidson College, class of 2020, B.A. in English
Amy Bonnaffons, University of Georgia, Ph.D student in Creative Writing
Genevieve Guzman, University of Georgia, Ph.D. student in Creative Writing
Kara Krewer, University of Georgia, Ph.D. student in Creative Writing
Rochel Gasson, Duquesne, Ph.D. student in English
John Hadlock, Duquesne, Ph.D. student in English

Advisory Board

Sara Crangle, Professor Modernism and the Avant-Garde (English), University of Sussex
Irene Gammel, Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature & Culture, Ryerson University; Director, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre
Alex Goody, Professor of English, Oxford-Brookes University
Cristanne Miller, Edward H. Butler Professor of English and SUNY Distinguished Professor, SUNY Buffalo; Director, Marianne Moore Digital Archive
Tara Prescott, Lecturer in Writing Programs, UCLA
Shawna Ross, Assistant Professor of English, Texas A & M University
Stephen Ross, Professor of English, University of Victoria; Co-Founder, Modernist Versions Project
Mark Sample, Associate Professor of Digital Studies, Davidson College
Whitney Trettien, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

This Project Is Supported by

The National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor

  • Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Web resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Davidson College

  • The Boswell Family Faculty Fellowship
  • Weinstein Summer Research Fellowship
  • Davidson Research Initiative

Duquesne University

  • McAnulty College of Liberal Arts NEH Endowment
  • Hillman Endowment

The University of Georgia

  • The Interdisciplinary Modernism(s) Research Cluster
  • The Willson Center Lab for Digital Humanities

Permissions

This non-commercial site is for educational purposes only. The material used in his site has been gathered in good faith according to fair use standards with full citations of all sources. We are especially grateful to libraries and digital archives that have made their collections freely available to scholars; in particular we would like to thank the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for use of their Digital Collections.

Whenever possible, we have attempted to secure permissions for any material that exceeds “fair use” standards or is protected by copyright. In some instances, it can be difficult to determine who, if anyone, holds the rights to materials or artifacts. In such instances, text and images will be considered on loan until someone objects. If you own the rights to something published here and would like it removed or cited differently, please contact suchurchill@davidson.edu.

Citation Guidelines

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Following MLA Style (8th edition) guidelines, we recommend citing this project as follows:

  • For the entire site:  Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill et al. Davidson College, 2017. mina-loy.com. Accessed [day-month-year].
  • For an individual essay, post, or page: [Author’s last name, first name]. [“Title.”] Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill et al. Davidson College, 2017. mina-loy.com. Accessed [day-month-year].

Note: these citation guidelines will change when we rebuild and relocate the site on UGA’s server.

Documentation

Peer Review

White Paper