Free Radicals: In Conversation with Joanna Scutts

Author and historian Joanna Scutts joined literary critic Maud Ellmann to talk all things bohemian, radical and feminist. Joanna’s latest book, Hotbed, tells the story of a secret women's club in New York who met to discuss politics, art, and literature.

About the speakers:

Joanna Scutts (KC 1997) is a feminist historian and literary critic based in Paris. She is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian New York and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism, and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Paris Review, and Times Literary Supplement, among others. After graduating from King's in 2000, she earned an MA in Modern British Literature from Sussex University and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York.

Maud Ellmann (KC 1972) is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several books and many essays and articles on modern British and Irish literature and literary theory, including studies of James Joyce and a monograph on Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003. Her most recent book is The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, a co-edited collection of essays on modern Irish art, culture, literature, and society.