Elisa Moy

I began my studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, graduating with a BA in English Language and Literature in 2024. I subsequently moved to Cambridge to undertake an MPhil in English Studies at Downing College, holding the Cambridge Masters & Downing Alf Monk scholarship. Starting in 2025, my DPhil is fully funded by scholarships from the AHRC, Christ Church College, and the Clarendon Fund, under the supervision of Professor Peter Boxall.

During my undergraduate and master’s research, I focused my attention on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, genetic criticism, and kinetic modernism, whilst also exploring diverse subjects such as orthographical variation in the Thomas More Manuscript and investigating the authorship of a neglected poem sometimes attributed to Jane Austen. My thesis explores the kinetic possibilities of sculpture, alongside the growing agenda to figure words themselves as sculptural. I am interested in applying the term ‘sculpture’ to a range of discrete things: conceptual uses in narrative, both material and kinetic; agglutinative, Joycean word compounds; a figurative approach to genetic criticism as sculptural; and crucially, I rethink a Formalist line of reading text as sculptural, rather than statuesque, urn-like, or monumental. The broad shape of this research emerges from the sculptural interests of Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, Anna Coleman Ladd, Mary Borden, Isaac Rosenberg, Ezra Pound, H.D., Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, braiding together three current fields in scholarship: new materialism, kinetic modernism, and genetic criticism. I am also currently editing Anna Coleman Ladd’s 1926 forgotten play, The Strong.