Professor Sarah Hayden

Sarah teaches undergraduates and postgraduates on material from across the 20th and 21st centuries and currently contributes to Poetic Language, Literary Transformations and Experiment! She devised and convenes Speech Acts: a critical/creative module on writing for voice and voice in writing.

Speech Acts invites students to explore how writers activate and amplify the sonic properties of language and why artists use vocal performance of text in video art. We consider how text can ‘perform’ on the page (or onscreen), and what it means for language to be performative. We investigate what writing for performance requires, how we ‘read’ what is spoken, and ‘hear’ what is written. Engaging with the work of artists and writers including JJJJJerome Ellis, Bhanu Kapil, Jay Bernard, Samuel Beckett, Sean Bonney, John Akomfrah, Moyra Davey, and Mona Hatoum, we explore the relations between writing, speaking and sounding.

I joined Southampton in 2016, having previously held Associate Lectureships in Visual Cultures and English & Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London and lectured on an occasional basis at University College Cork and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. My interdisciplinary research has long been concerned with the relations between art and experimental writing practices, but over time my focus has shifted across decades (and centuries!) and addressed a range of modes and media.

At present, my research explores the intersection of voice, text and access in contemporary art. You can read about my current book project, Voiceworks, and the public events, workshops, exhibitions and collaborations associated with my AHRC Innovation Fellowship project, Voices in the Gallery, under Research.

My doctoral research at University College Cork was in early 20th-century modernist and avant-garde studies, and centred on the writings of Mina Loy. Having completed this IRC-funded comparativist literary study, I took up a DAAD postdoctoral fellowship in History of Art at the Freie Universität Berlin then (after a short digressionary excursion into Paris Dada) returned to UCC to complete a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship. 

My first book, Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood, was published in 2018 by University of New Mexico Press. Positioning Loy as an exemplary theorist of the artist-figure (1909-1945), this study exposes Loy’s radically critical perspective on the evolution of the international artworld in transit from Europe to the US. Tracking Loy’s theorizations of Futurist, Dada, Surrealist and ‘Degenerate’ artisthood through her poetry, prose, drama and polemics, the book culminates in an examination of her legacies in 21st-century American poetics. This book was reviewed in The Review of English Studies, Modernism/modernity, and American Literary History and elsewhere. Prior to publishing Curious Disciplines, I provided the introduction and edited new archival material for the re-issue of Mina Loy’s 1930’s novel, Insel (New York: Melville House Press). 

My second book, Peter Roehr–Field Pulsations is jointly authored with Paul Hegarty. This book is the first monograph on the German Minimalist and Pop artist, Peter Roehr, who produced highly repetitive work using mass-produced material in text, film, sound, photographs, objects and images. As well as his artistic work, Roehr was significant in his curation of international art and is now being rediscovered as a force in 1960s experimental art. 

I sometimes publish and perform as a poet and ran the Entropics series at Southampton. My poems and lecture-poems have been published in magazines including Blackbox Manifold, para-text, Golden Handcuffs Review, Tripwire, Datableed and performed in the UK, US, Ireland, Germany and Czech Republic. Four long cycles have appeared as the chapbooks, Sitevisit (Materials), Turnpikes (Sad Press), System Without Issue (Oystercatcher Press) and Exteroceptive (Wild Honey Press).

Alongside research and writing, my work sometimes allows me to curate exhibitions as well as event programmes. In 2020, I curated Many voices, all of them loved at John Hansard Gallery. This exhibition featured work by Emma Wolukau Wanambwa, Laure Prouvost, Kader Attia, Willem de Rooij, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Liza Sylvestre. In the same year, I was invited by Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul at Queer Art Projects to guest-curate a voice-in-video strand of #WIP: an exhibition themed around process and work-in-progress. For #WIP, I selected work by five artists—Larry Achiampong, Sam Keogh, Naeem Mohaiemen, Sophie Seita and P. Staff—whose practices are situated between video, performance and writing. In 2022, I  curated asweetsea: a a solo exhibition of new work by Liza Sylvestre, at John Hansard Gallery.