Dr. Udith Dematagoda

11/2023 – Present: Assistant Professor, Department of English and American Studies, University of Konstanz

07/2023 – 11/2023: Visiting Fellow in Excellence Cluster Temporal Communities ‘Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’, Freie Universität Berlin.

09/2020 – 08/2023: Assistant Professor, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

11/2017 – ­­­­09/2020: Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz

2012 – 2014: Maître de Langue & Lecteur d’anglais , University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (now Côte d'Azur University), France

2010 – 2012: Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Glasgow, UK

Assistant Professor at the University of Konstanz, in the Department of English and American Studies, working within the ‘Transforming Infrastructure – Cultural Perspectives’ research initiative. Previously I was Assistant Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo from 2020-2023, based in WIAS (Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies), prior to which I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Zukunftskolleg at Konstanz from 2017-2020. Originally from Scotland, I'm a modernist literature scholar and theorist. I have written on Vladimir Nabokov, Wyndham Lewis, the relation between ideology and aesthetics in Fascist Modernism, Aesthetic Theory and Digital Humanities. I took my PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow in 2016. My recently completed book project focuses on the relationship between technology, masculinity, and fascism within English and European Modernist narratives, and examines work by Wyndham Lewis, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti and Julius Evola - amongst others. Previously, I wrote on Vladimir Nabokov and politics.  My first monograph 'Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic', was published in September 2017. I am the editor of a volume of the Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis, 'Left Wings Over Europe', currently in production with Oxford University Press. I have served on the Executive Committee of the British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS) since 2021.

2016: PhD in English Literature, University of Glasgow, UK

2010: Postgraduate Diploma (PGdip) in Russian Language, University of Glasgow, UK

2009: Masters (MA) in Creative Writing and English Literature, University of Manchester, UK

2008: MA (hons) in Comparative Literature and Slavonic Studies at The University of Glasgow, UK

Wyndham Lewis, Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: Left Wings Over Europe, ed. by Udith Dematagoda (Oxford: OUP, 2023) (in press)

Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017)

Book Manuscript

Machine Men, Machine Minds, Machine Hearts: Technology, Masculinity and Fascist Modernities (under review)

Articles

Dematagoda, Udith & Asomatos, Christos, 'The Ideological Aesthetic, the Political as Inevitable and Epiphenomenal', Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 28, Issue 5 (2023).

‘Machinic Desire: Wyndham Lewis, Masculinity and the Sublime Horror of Technological War’, Modernist Cultures, November 2020, vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 488-514.

‘National Allegory as Negative Dialectic in Wyndham Lewis's Tarr’, The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, Volume 9, 2018.

‘Revenge of the Nerds: Recidivist Masculinity, Identity Politics and the online 'Culture Wars'’, Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol.1, no. 3, December 2017, University of Oslo Press