Jeremy Braddock

I’ve just written a book about the media collective/comedy group the Firesign Theatre, something I’ve wanted to do since I was about twenty years old. I listened to Firesign records as a teenager, which led me to do things like make my own recordings, do a zine in the 1990s, and eventually study the literature, art, culture, and media of modernism (something that had obviously inspired the Firesign Theatre too). Up until now, most of my writing has been about modernist art, literature, and culture — mostly in the United States. My research has looked at cultural institutions, at the dynamics of artist groups and their collective work, and the way modernist art was received, celebrated, contested, and translated in different contexts — for instance in Harlem intellectuals’ response to James Joyce’s Ulysses during the years the novel was banned in the United States. A lot of my work is based in archives. My new book is *Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums* (California, 2024). Before that, I wrote *Collecting as Modernist Practice* (Johns Hopkins 2012), which studies the way literary anthologies, art collections, and institutional archives all participated in the context for the way modernism would be institutionalized in the U.S. I’m also co-editor of *Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic* (Johns Hopkins, 2013) and *Directed by Allen Smithee* (Minnesota 2001). I live in upstate New York.