Meghan Forbes is Czech Lecturer in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and teaches courses in Central European literature and visual culture, as well as the Czech language. Her research considers the interwar avant-garde through the lense of periodical and epistolary studies, mapping transnational networks of exchange enacted in print, correspondence, and via travel across geographic, linguistic, and gendered boundaries. She has received numerous grants and fellowships for her work, including a Fulbright award to conduct dissertation research in Berlin, Germany (2014-2015).

For the 2016/2017 academic year, she is also a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, where she is organizing a three-day event—Summoning the Archive: A Symposium on Periodical, Printed Matter, and Digital Archiving—to take place May 11-13. The symposium, which includes site visits to the collections of the Barnard Zine Library, MoMA, and the NYPL will bring together an international group of scholars, editors, archivists, and librarians to discuss such themes as the politics of translation in multilingual or internationally circulated publications, serial print culture as an intersectional axis for genre, language, race, gender, and sexuality, and the role and relevance of print publication in the digital age.

Her writing for audiences both inside and out of the academy has appeared in such journals as Umění/Art, post at MoMA, Words Without Borders, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her essay “‘What I Could Lose’: The Fate of Lucia Moholy,” which appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Meghan is also the founder and co-editor of harlequin creature, an arts and literature imprint. With hc, she conducts a series of creative writing workshops with children, at such institutions as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dia:Beacon, and 826.