Stories from the Space Between

In this episode Megan Faragher talks about her new book, Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn (Oxford University Press, 2021). She shares stories about what she calls "pollmindedness" in the 1930s, its roots in Victorian occultism, and its relevance today. We discuss the writers Celia Fremlin, Naomi Mitchison, and H.G. Wells as well as the work of Mass Observation and the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO). Megan is Associate Professor of English at Wright State University - Lake Campus. Her research and teaching interests center on British literature between the world wars, and the intersection between technology, information, and culture. Her scholarship has been published in Textual Practice, The Space Between Journal, and Literature & History. She has also contributed essays to the collections Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor (Routledge 2019) and Twenty-First Century British Fiction and the City (Palgrave 2018). 

In this premier episode Kristin Bluemel tells the story of artist Gwen Raverat (1885-1957) and other women wood engravers whose work contributed to an engraving revival in 1930s England. Kristin Bluemel is Professor of English and the Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University. She is the author of books on Dorothy Richardson and George Orwell, editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), co-editor of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention ((Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and editor of Blitz Writing (Handheld Press, 2019). From January to June 2022 she will be Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University.