The Journal of Modern Craft

I would like to thank everyone on Facebook’s Critical Craft Forum for so many thoughtful, useful contributions on my last set of, and expand upon some of my remarks. My concerns have to do with the fact that craft and material culture histories have only VERY recently (last ten years or so) been taken up by critically-oriented scholars [...]

For this blog post, Kevin asked me to consider the query: Are there ways of being a craft writer beyond the academy? My honest answer is that there are not. While criticism itself exists somewhere between journalism and theory, the sad fact is that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a living as a [...]

Reading Glenn Adamson’s and Tanya Harrod’s joint interview with novelist A.S. Byatt (or Dame Antonia Byatt, as she is known in her home context—to my American tastebuds, Dame, I must confess, feels funny on the tongue), I was struck by the nationalism of her project, and the utter Englishness with which she is grappling: the difficulties [...]