Dr Guy Stevenson
Postdoctoral Fellow, March - May 2019
Biography
Guy Stevenson is a lecturer in English and postdoctoral associate at Goldsmiths, University of London. He works on literary modernism of the early twentieth century and the 1960s counterculture, with an emphasis on the politics of both periods and unexpected connections between them. Guy has published essays in The European Journal of English Studies along with chapters in anthologies about his two main Ph.D. subjects, Henry Miller and Ezra Pound. He is currently editing a special issue of the journal Textual Practice on the subject of ‘Anti-Humanist Modernisms’.
Project: Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture
At IASH he will be researching part of a book about the politics of 1950s and 60s literary school The Beat Generation. He will look particularly at the impact of Beat ideas in Britain, drawing on records of the 1962 International Edinburgh Writers’ Conference – a major transatlantic literary event – to consider the relationship between British and American philosophical and political approaches among experimental authors. The project’s larger aim is to challenge conventional assumptions about literary progressivism in the post-war period, highlighting politically and philosophically reactionary aspects of the Beats’ work to reassess the influence of a historically significant movement on the larger culture, in their time and ours.