TOPCRIT is built on a solid base of research and analysis of canonical and cutting-edge new writing on critique and post-critique, post-critical writing, and the future shape of literary studies. Research in this area has run the full duration of the project, complemented by reading and close textual analysis in an alternative tradition whose lineaments the project has sought to define: experimental literary-critical writing by women authors in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Activities undertaken during the project, and its principal results, include:
Production of a multifunctional project website that acts as a hub for all project activities, publications and related material, news, and events.
Publication of six individual articles and/or book chapters on the conceptual profile of post-critique and on the experimental writing of contemporary women authors writing in English, including Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Denise Riley, Lisa Robertson, and Jan Zwicky.
Publishing a co-edited book, Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2022), which features one of these articles, and which won a Gradiva Award for Best Edited Book in 2022.
Publishing a highly visible monograph, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist (Oxford University Press, 2023), which features three of the project's key articles, and which won the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2024.
Presenting the project and its results as an invited speaker at a range of international conferences, public venues and media events in Belgium, Italy, Norway, Spain and the UK.
Coordination of Performing the Lecture, a program of public lecture-performances and conversations held in collaboration with several top cultural organisations in Barcelona.
Founding and coordinating an open departmental reading group in Poetry and Philosophy, and participating as a speaker in departmental outreach activities including a cycle of talks on contemporary culture and repetition.
Targeted course-based training in university teaching at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
On-the-job training in conference and public event organisation, research with a strong gender dimension, and public engagement.
Exploitation of project results to secure future collaborations with cultural organisations and a top interdisciplinary research centre in the UK.