About
Siân Round is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication. Her research interests lie in cultures of the US South, the Harlem Renaissance, periodical cultures, and collaboration. Her Leverhulme project, funded between 2024 and 2027, is titled 'The Harlem Renaissance and the Southern Tour, 1919-1935'. Focusing on authors including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Spencer, and Sterling A. Brown, this project uses the tour as a lens for studying African American encounters with the culture of the US South in the post-Great Migration period. Alongside the Leverhulme Trust, this project has been awarded fellowships from the University of Virginia, Williams College, and the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Siân has recently finished her first monograph, provisionally titled The Serial South: The Little Magazine in the US South, 1921-1945, forthcoming with University of Georgia Press in Spring 2027. Building on her doctoral thesis (University of Cambridge, 2023), this monograph provides the first critical study of literary magazines in the US South during the period commonly called the Southern Renaissance. It explores how the affordances of the periodical form (seriality, circulation, ephemerality) enabled editors and contributors to negotiate the label of 'Southernness'. An article stemming from this project, "Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit and Periodical Readerships," published in Journal of American Studies, won the Research Society for American Periodicals Article Prize 2024-25. Other research from this project has appeared in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and the Routledge Companion to Literature of the US South.
Other recent and ongoing projects include organising a one-day conference on Radical Print Cultures in the US South (2024), creating a research seminar series of "New Welsh Voices in English Literature," and writing an essay on Southern editorials from the nineteenth century to the present day for the Edinburgh Companion to Regional Magazines. She teaches a little at Swansea, and previously she taught a lot at Cardiff University and the University of Cambridge.