History

The Iberian Modernist Studies Forum began as the Spanish and Italian Modernist Studies Forum (SIMSF), which was founded in 2013 at Penn State. One of SIMSF’s primary objectives was to explore the socio-historical, cultural, and aesthetic transformations that fundamentally shaped Spain and Italy during the modernist period.  Through its emphasis on multidisciplinarity and its commitment to scholarly exchange, SIMSF served as a structure that enabled the dissemination of the most recent research in the field. Its graduate seminars, lecture series, symposia, research workshops, salons, and reading groups established an intellectual community that was reflective of the forum’s commitment to cutting edge research and inclusivity.

While the cultural landscape of Modernist Studies had changed significantly by 2013 when SIMSF was founded, much more was needed to expand its intercultural and transcultural comparative frameworks. With its focus on Spain and Italy, SIMSF aimed to contribute to this larger comparative project through its various activities and scholarly outreach. It also sought to shed light on the fundamental center/margin framework that in many ways still structures the field of Modernist Studies today and raises the notion that modernism, as a cohesive movement and sensibility, was somehow diluted, inchoate, derivative, and minor in those geographical areas situated beyond the so-called original centers of production. It was clear that the marginalization of Spanish, Italian, and various other modernisms in debates about modernity demanded that the forum interrogate the sociocultural and hegemonic implications of marginality itself. As Geist and Monleón aptly put it, the very idea of “margin” exposes the blind spot that subtends modernist criticism when it comes to other modernisms. That is to say, the belief that “the more distant a society is from the nuclei of capitalist development, the less modern—and, therefore, modernist—it must be,” is complicated by the fact that “vanguard innovators were frequently imported from the periphery: Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Apollinaire, Kafka, Picasso, Dalí, Buñuel, to name just a few.”

In 2019, SIMSF evolved into the Iberian Modernist Studies Forum (IMSF), and recalibrated its focus towards the socio-cultural complexities of Iberian modernisms within a global context. It organized a series of collaborative colloquia titled “The Afterlives of Unamuno and Pessoa,” and “Unamuno and Pessoa in Dialogue,” exploring the various connections and differences between Miguel de Unamuno’s and Fernando Pessoa’s work. More concretely, these colloquia brought together a diverse group of scholars and translators to tackle how Unamuno’s and Pessoa’s life and work have been nationalized, and even commodified, in the Iberian sociocultural imaginary within the last few decades.

In 2023, IMSF found its new home in the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University, where it continues the important mission of exploring the intercultural and transcultural comparative frameworks that have shaped modernist culture.