Mahoney Establishes New Journal

Kristin Mahoney, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, has helped create a new journal that focuses on field-defining scholarship on the works, authors, artists, problems, and phenomena that defined the dynamic period from the late 19^th century to the early 20^th century. 

The journal, titled Cusp: Late 19^th-/Early 20^th-Century Cultures, aims to promote interdisciplinarity scholarship on the visual arts, cinema and theatre, literature, periodical studies, and music. 

Mahoney, whose research focuses on late-Victorian Decadence and its afterlives in the 20^th century, says she has always felt her work doesn’t fit properly within Victorian studies or modernist studies “and I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

“My work operates across that boundary of periodization,” Mahoney said. “Everybody who is writing during the Victorian period doesn’t very neatly pass away in 1901. A lot of these people continue to work and influence some of the newer younger writers who are starting to publish in the 1910s and 1920s.” 

The idea behind Cusp came right before the COVID-19 pandemic when a similar journal, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, shut down. This concerned Mahoney and her Cusp co-editors, Kate Hext and Alex Murray, as it had been an important space for scholars to publish their work that doesn’t properly fit into Victorian studies or modernist studies.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Letter website.