Maisie Drummond
Doctoral Student in Literature - Maisie’s thesis is entitled ‘Newcastle to New York: Tom Pickard and the Transnational Networks of Late-Modernist Poetry’.
Research Project Title:
Newcastle to New York: Tom Pickard and the Transnational Networks of Late-Modernist Poetry.
Supervisors:
Dr Alex Niven and Dr Mark Byers
Contact Details:
Email: m.drummond3@newcastle.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Late modernist poetry
- The literary history of the north east
- Critical and cultural theory
- Theories of consumption, the body, the abject
Brief Outline of Research Project:
My research surrounds the North East poet Tom Pickard. It situates his work within the transnational networks which shaped and sustained late-modernist verse. Drawing on poetry and relevant archival materials, the project appraises Pickard’s work as an embodiment of creative alliance, reimagining poetic labour as an essential operation of working class communities amid deindustrialization. Study of his example will facilitate a wider discussion of collective actualization in a post-war literary milieu: of allies working together against the material conditions of poverty, unemployment, class constraints, and the bureaucratization of the arts under late capitalism. It will re-examine local contexts as components of a larger matrix, in which regionally bound motifs find sympathetic equivalence in communities across the Atlantic.
Placements and Funding
AHRC Northern Bridge Studentship, 2023
Cambridge Trust Studentship, University of Cambridge 2021
Awards
Members’ English Prize Overall Best MPhil Dissertation, University of Cambridge 2022