Kaja Marczewska

I am a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures and a member of Information as Material editorial collective. 

Before joining Coventry in 2018, I was a Lecturer in English and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster. I completed my PhD at the Department of English Studies, Durham University, supervised by Professor Patricia Waugh and funded by the Von Huegel fellowship and the Durham Doctoral Studentship. I was an Eccles Centre Fellow in American Studies at the British Library in 2014 and a visiting researcher at Dartmouth College, USA in April 2015. In 2018, I was a Reese Fellow for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas, a Terra Foundation fellow, and a visiting researcher at the Getty Research Institute library and in the summer 2019, I will be A Michigan State University Summer Fellow based at the University’s special collections.

My research is positioned at the intersection of publishing and book cultures, cultural studies, and experimental arts and writing. My interests include artists’ books, the small press, institutions of knowledge production, cultural economies, publishing and artists’ collectives, and forms of self-organisation, in particular as they relate to print cultures.

My first book, The is not a copy: writing at the Iterative Turn was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018. It investigates the implications of the propensity to copy as a creative practice in contemporary culture. In this project, I explore contemporary approaches to cultural production as a manifestation of what I call the Iterative Turn in order to re-think copying in art and writing as a critical praxis. I focus in particular on contemporary experimental writing practices to show ways in which today iteration is employed as a paradoxical tool of the contemporary avant-garde.

In my most recent work, I translate my thinking on innovative forms of writing onto reserach on book cultures and grassroots engagements with print and publishing, i.e. I move away from focus on text to instead engage with its materiality and institutions. My work in this area is developed in two key strands:

1. grassroots publishing, the small press and their histories

I am currently working on a second monograph which will be published in the Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Publishing and Book Cultures series. The project explores the rise, decline, and the recent revival of the small press movement though the histories of its distribution networks. In this book, I focus as much on the infrastructures of the book – e.g. the bookshop, the library, the wholesaler – as I do on the networks and systems that make various forms of book mobility possible – i.e. the highway system and its transformations, the car, and the bus, among others. Tracing the development of initiatives such as publishing co-operatives and book buses against the backdrop of key developments such as the 1956 Highway Act in the USA and the Oil Crisis, the project asks questions about the role of infrastructures in the changing politics and economies of grassroots publishing. This project grows out of extensive archival research funded by The Terra Foundation, The Getty Research Institute, and the Bibliographical Society of America.

Together with Leigh Wilson and Georgina Colby, I also am currently editing a collection of essays on the small press, its histories, contemporary legacies, and economies which is due to be published in the Palgrave's New Directions in Book History series in 2020.

        2. cultures of self-publishing

My work in progress also includes research into cultures of self-publishing in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. My published and forthcoming work in this area includes explorations of the contemporary zine publishing practices among the far-right communities, the role of self-publishing in cultures of self-organisation, as well as Ed Rusha’s work as a self-publisher. Central to all these projects is my focus on transformation of reproduction technologies and their impact on production and distribution models for art and writing.

I also have a long-standing interest in hybrid creative-critical forms and in alternative forms of making research public. In 2015/16, I curated a series of events at Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London showcasing contemporary experimental writing practices and interrogating ideas of experimentation in the arts today. I was also the organiser of the UK premiere of Mark Amerika's Immobilité, an experimental mobile phone film, which was shown in May 2016 at the Regent Street cinema in London, and a curator of Forms of Criticism symposium at Parasol Unit, London in June 2016. The latter brought together artists, curators, critics, writers and academics engaging in hybrid creative-critical practices.

In 2016/17 I was also a Principal Investigator on a BA/Leverhulme Trust funded project on Critical Digital Humanities (co-run with Dr Aden Evens at Dartmouth College, USA), which included a series of workshops and a a public lecture by Alexander Galloway at Carroll/Fletcher Gallery in London.

In 2019, I am collaborating with Janneke Adema, at Coventry, developing a programme of events focused on post-publishing, i.e. iterative and processual forms of publication (https://www.post-publishing.org/).