Contributors to the Edition

Ryan Weberling is an independent researcher and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His book project, “Constituting Decadence: Anglophone Modernist Fiction and the Politics of Federation, 1880-1980,” examines innovations in narrative form alongside constitutional changes across the Anglophone world, offering a critical account of federation not only as a modern state form but as a model of social change and a utopian but historically racialized ideal. His writing has appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Literature and Politics, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), and the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

Caitlyn Georgiou is a PhD candidate in literary studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received a bachelor’s degree in English and Religious Studies as well as a master’s degree in English from the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on representations of self-harm, suicide, and violence in twentieth-century US literature, but she also specializes in southern studies and new media. Some of Caitlyn’s projects include a socio-environmental reading of the hurricane scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, research on the narratives that helped construct the so-called “suicide barrier” installed on the Golden Gate Bridge, and a study of (mis)queered suicide narratives in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and the 2017 podcast S-Town.

Eric Derwent Walrond was an Afro-Caribbean writer who played an important role in the international milieu of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in British Guiana in 1898, Walrond grew up in Barbados and then Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal, working as a clerk for the Panama Canal Commission and a reporter for the Panama Star & Herald. He relocated to New York City in 1918 and soon connected with a range of writers, artists, activists, and intellectuals, helping to manage periodicals including the Brooklyn and Long Island Informer, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, and Charles Johnson’s Opportunity; and contributing to these publications, as well as Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and many others. After the release of his award-winning short story collection, Tropic Death (1926), Walrond traveled through the Caribbean and Europe while working on his next book, which was to be a historical study of the Panama Canal. Though this project was never completed, he continued to write, publish, and participate in local literary and theater culture over the next four decades. Walrond settled in England in 1931, first in London, then in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. From 1952 to 1957, he lived voluntarily at the Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, then relocated to London, where he passed away in 1966.