My first book, Stratified Modernism (Peter Lang, 2009), traces the effect of the great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on French and Anglo-American writers including Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, Ezra Pound, H.D., Freud the French Surrealists and Charles Olson. The book explores how archaeology influenced the modernist imagination in numerous ways from fantasies of connecting with the ancient past to the retrieval of an original poetic language to the psychoanalytic idea of the mind itself as an archaeological site. Thanks to funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the British Council, I was able to incorporate research from archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, and Mexico in addition to libraries and archives in the UK and France.
The book has gone on to be considered a “ground breaking” study that “firmly established the modernist entwinement of archaeological and psychological dynamics” (Dobson and Banks, Excavating Modernity, 2018). Stand alone chapters have appeared as articles in Arizona Quarterly and Comparative Literature and Culture.