Henry Barlow

Thesis title: Modernism and Print Pedagogy

Supervisor: Michael Whitworth

My DPhil explores the ways in which modernist literature responded to literary scholarship and pedagogy contemporaneous with it. How, for example, do Eliot's infamous notes to The Waste Land relate to popular scholarly annotations in Oxford University Press titles of the early twentieth century? A second part studies how these dynamics influenced modernism's later reception within the academy by examining the works of writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Sylvia Plath who were teaching modernist works in the 1950s. My research is generously funded by a Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship.

I write critical essays on music, literature, and film, and very occasionally I come up with a poem or two. My work has appeared in the Oxford Review of Books and The Weasel. My essay 'Approaching Perfection' received the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize in 2026, and can be accessed here.

Publications: 'Waiting on the Threshold in Ulysses,' Forthcoming in Affirmations: of the modern.

Conferences: '"Life as commentary to abstruse unfinished poem": the Pleasures and Pitfalls of Modernist Annotatability in Nabokov's Pale Fire,' Modernist Studies Association 2026 Annual Conference, Loughborough, July 2026; 'How to Do Things with Schemas,' International James Joyce Symposium, Krakow, June 2026; 'Act Speech: The Medieval Disputation and Professional Interpretation in Ulysses,' Philosophy & Literature Graduate Student Conference 2026, San Francisco, May 2026; ;Waiting on the Threshold with Joyce and Benjamin,' Australasian Modernist Studies Network Conference, Hobart, December 2024.