The Network was founded in 2008 with an AHRC Network Award of £42,000 to Faye Hammill (then at the University of Strathclyde). The co-founders of the network were Erica Brown (then at Sheffield Hallam University) and Mary Grover (Independent Scholar, Sheffield), with support from Chris Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University).
A report on Network achievements in the first two years was submitted to the AHRC in 2010. This tells you about our key intellectual findings, our activities and events, and the people who were involved, as members of our Core Group and Advisory Board.
The first administrator of the Network was Dr Erica Brown. Since 2015, the project has been administrated by Dr David Rush of the University of Strathclyde. The Network continues to be led by Faye Hammill, now at the University of Glasgow, and the partnership with Sheffield Hallam is maintained by Chris Hopkins, Professor Emeritus, who edits the Reading 1900-1950 blog.
Our Defining the Middlebrow page sets out some of the different dimensions of the term ‘middlebrow’, and relates these to the intellectual goals of the Network.
The Network’s central event was the 2009 ‘Middlebrow Cultures’ conference in Glasgow. The Programme and Abstracts provide a record.
Among our key publications are:
- Erica Brown and Mary Grover (eds.), Middlebrow Literary Cultures: the Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960 (Palgrave, 2011)
- Sophie Blanch and Melissa Sullivan (eds.), ‘The Middlebrow – Within or Without Modernism’, special issue of Modernist Cultures, vol 6.1, May 2011
- Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool University Press, 2010)
- Erica Brown (ed.), ‘Investigating the Middlebrow’, special issue of Working Papers on the Web, vol 11, July 2008
The Middlebrow Network 