University of Lethbridge

Biography

Born in St. John's, Newfoundland in 1969, Craig Monk received degrees from Memorial University (1992), the University of Western Ontario (1993), and Oxford University (1996). Before joining the UofL in 1997, he taught at Oxford, Memorial, and the University of Reading. A Professor in the Department of English, he has primary responsibility for the instruction of American and British literatures of the first half of the twentieth century, though he is also interested in interdisciplinary modernism, autobiography, and publishing history. He joined the Dean's Office in the Faculty of Arts and Science as Assistant Dean (Students) in July 2005, and he served as Associate Dean from October 2006 until June 2012. He received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award at the Spring 2007 convocation. For six years, he was a pronouncer and judge for CanWest Regional spelling bees in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Between 2007 and 2012, he blogged "The Classroom Conservative," advocating traditional pedagogy in the face of changing educational values. In 2010, he became co-editor (with Cynthia Patterson and Karen Roggenkamp) of American Periodicals, the journal of record in magazine studies in the United States. Currently, he writes the "Talking Out of School" column for University Affairs, published by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

Selected Publications

"Negotiating the Margins of the American South: The Double Dealer and the Start of the Southern Renaissance," in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Little Magazines, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford UP, Forthcoming, 2012).

"Optograms, Autobiography, and the Image of Jack the Ripper." Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 12.1 (Fall 2010): 91-104.

"Ezra Pound and Literary Magazines," in Ezra Pound in Context, edited by Ira Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 345-55.

Writing the Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and the Character of American Modernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008.

"When Eustace Tilley Came to Madison Square Garden: Professional Hockey and the Editorial Policy of the New Yorker in the 1920s and 1930s." American Periodicals 15.2 (Fall 2005): 178-95.

"Beckett is Vertical: Proselytizing With the Littles, 1929-38." Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 27.2/28.1 (Fall 2001/Spring 2002): 8-19.

"'America is Frankly Contemptuous': Joyce's Work in Progress for the United States," in Joyce's Audiences, edited by John Nash (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2002), 111-26.

"Emma Goldman, Mother Earth, and the Little Magazine Impulse in Modern America," in The Only Efficient Instrument: American Women and the Periodical, 1837-1916, edited by Aleta Cane and Susan Alves (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 113-25.

"Textual Authority and Modern American Autobiography: Robert McAlmon, Kay Boyle, and the Writing of a Lost Generation." Journal of American Studies 35.3 (December 2001): 485-97.

"The Price of Publishing Modernism: Ezra Pound and the Exile in America." Canadian Review of American Studies 31.1 (April 2001): 429-46.

"Eugene Jolas and the Translation Policies of transition." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32.4 (December 1999): 17-34.

"Modernism in the Age of Transition: The Expatriate American Magazine in Europe Between the World Wars." Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 20 (1999): 55-72.

"Sound Over Sight: James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in transition," in ReJoyce: Text, Culture, Politics, edited by John Brannigan, Geoff Ward, and Julian Wolfreys (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 17-32.

"Photography in Eugene Jolas's transition Magazine." History of Photography 20.4 (Winter 1996): 362-65.

"transition and Merlin: Two Generations of Little Magazines in Paris." Journal of Modern Literature 20.2 (Winter 1996): 217-23.

"The Political F. Scott Fitzgerald: Liberal Illusion and Disillusion in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned." American Studies International 33.2 (October 1995): 60-70.

In The Media

Prof Exchanges Pronghorns for Longhorns; Legend; June 2003.

English Professor Studies Self-Conscious Writers; Legend; May 2002.

Research Interests

Dr. Monk's research traces the connections between modern American literature and twentieth-century European culture. From 2001 to 2004, he held a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Writing the Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism, the resulting monograph published in 2008 by the University of Iowa Press, examines the ways in which expatriate writers from the United States used life narrative to frame their achievement. He was assisted in this project by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the University of Texas and an Everett Helm Fellowship at Indiana University. Much of the research was completed as an Honorary Research Associate at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax. Follow a link to the book here.

He is also interested in the history of "little magazine" publishing by Americans abroad, the topic of his graduate research while a Rothermere Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford University. His work on periodical literature has been published in American Periodicals, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, the Canadian Review of American Studies, History of Photography, Journal of Modern Literature, Miscelanea, Mosaic, as well as numerous edited volumes on modernism. He resumed his study of expatriate American magazines during 2012-13 through the generosity of a Jackson Brothers Fellowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Previous Research

Title	Grant Agency	Completion Date
“Writing The Lost Generation”	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)	2004