Roxana Preda

Leverhulme Fellow

CV

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Qualifications

Dr. Phil in Literary Theory and American Literature

Responsibilities & affiliations

Chair of the Ezra Pound Society

Senior editor of Make It New

Member of the Modern Language Association (MLA)

Member of the British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS)

Research summary

My main research interest is in modernism and contemporary American literature. I have several long-term projects that focus on modernism and the arts, as well as author studies, particularly on Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.

Current research interests

My most recent publications are a monograph on the academic reception of Ezra Pound called Professional Attention (2018) and two collective volumes, The Edinburgh Companion on Ezra Pound and the Arts and A Companion to Ezra Pound and Economics (2019). My current digital work consists in the re-annotation of Ezra Pound's poem The Cantos. The platform, The Cantos Project, is now developing into a major reference for the annotated text, sources and secondary literature on the poem and is meant to serve both research and teaching.

Past research interests

I am scholar of Ezra Pound and am interested in modernism, especially modernist poetry in Europe and the United States.

Project activity

The Cantos Project is a digital research environment (DRE) dedicated to the study of Ezra Pound’s monumental long poem, The Cantos, a poem which was started around May 1915 and closed by 1959. After that date, uncollected fragments of the poem continued to be published, Drafts and Fragments (1968), Posthumous Cantos (2002, 2015) and Sero te amavi (forcoming). The first collection of fragments (1968) is now included within the body of The Cantos proper, having received Pound’s authorization, and is considered the poem’s epilogue.

The project is edited by Andrew Taylor and Roxana Preda at the School of Literatures Languages and Cultures of the University of Edinburgh and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust until 2021.

The goals of the project are twofold: maintain and develop the current and future readership of the poem through multimedia annotation; further, provide a space where the community of Pound scholars, as well as students of the poem can find the best work of the past, talk to each other and develop the scholarship of the future. 

Permission to proceed was graciously granted by New Directions in February 2012 and formally reinforced in March 2013. The negotiations established that only twelve cantos would be available for display at any one time.

The Cantos Project is peer-reviewed by a board of scholars who agreed to supervise the project as a whole. The editors submit every annotated canto to the scholarly board before publishing on the site.

Current project grants

Leverhulme grant, 2016-2021

Past project grants

Thyssen Stiftung, 2001-2003 for Ezra Pound's Economic Correspondence, John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. Project published in 2007.