Dr. Sean Ketteringham
Sean Ketteringham joined the Centre as a visiting fellow in October 2024.
Having received his DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford in 2022, Sean has held postdoctoral positions at Oxford and, currently, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. His research concerns late modernist literary, visual, and architectural constructions of English national and imperial identity, focussing on the political and cultural conditions of imperial decline. His article on the artist and architect Frederick Etchells was published in Modernist Cultures in 2022 and he recently completed his first monograph, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism.
Sean is currently beginning a new research project on English artists' and writers' engagement with folk art and anthropological thought after 1945, provisionally entitled 'Postwar Folk'. His other active interests include the anarchist anti-imperialism of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and the coloniality of architectural preservation in the Atlantic world.
While at the Centre, Sean will be organising a reading group and a pair of public lectures. In line with his monograph, these events aim to develop the interdisciplinary account of how anti-imperial agitation and narratives of imperial decline shaped the activity of modernist writers and architects working in interwar England.