Telephone: 0207 911 5000 ext 2355
Email: S.Mays@wmin.ac.uk
Postal: Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies,
University of Westminster,
32-38 Wells Street,
London, W1T 3UW
Section: English Literature

Sas Mays is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Critical Theory in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies.

He is Module Leader for the MA / PhD core module ‘Archives and Research’, the BA second year core module ‘Critical Perspectives’, the first year module ‘Introduction to Arts and Culture’, and the third year dissertations. Sas also teaches on the MA core programme ‘Reading and Re-reading’.

He was educated at University College London (BA Hons in English Language and Literature, First Class, 1993), University of Sussex (MA in Critical Theory, 1994) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice, 2005).

His major area of research is in the gender politics of the archive in historical and contemporary culture, with particular emphasis on the history of photography, nineteenth century prose fiction, and the history of philosophy.

The collection Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century, which he co-edited with David Cunningham, was published in 2005, and he is currently compiling two collections of essays: one on representations of the library in a number of discourses in the humanities; and another on the role of spiritualism in historical and contemporary visual culture. Three further collections are in early process: one concerning Marxist theories of archives and memory; one concerning the politics of contemporary digital publishing; and another concerning contemporary critical theory and institutional memory. An article on philosophy’s relation to the archive is published in Cultural Politics 5.1 March 2009, entitled ‘Consigning Badiou to the Past’.

Sas was the Principle Investigator for the research project, funded by the AHRC Beyond Text award, entitled ‘Spiritualism and Technology in Historical and Contemporary Contexts’ (2008-2009). For further information, please see www.beyondtext.ac.uk. Following this project, Sas now directs the research project ‘Archiving Cultures’ as part of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture. Further details of the project’s events can be found at www.archivingcultures.org.

Sas would welcome applications for doctoral research from potential students; for further indication of his academic interests, please see the list below.

Conference papers and Publications:

• Unpacking the Library: Literatures and their Archives, Rodopi 2011 (forthcoming).

• ‘Minimalism and the Mathematical Sublime’, The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language symposium, spring 2010 (by invitation).
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• ‘Photography and the Archive I & II’ – two lectures delivered for the course Investigating the Archive: Photographic Collections of London, at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in association with Birkbeck College, January 2010 (by invitation).

• ‘Documents, Accumulation, and the Politics of Endlessness’, The Political Life of Documents: Archives, Memory, and Contested Knowledge, CRASSH (University of Cambridge), January 2010.

• ‘Current Archival Issues for Art History and Contemporary Art’, review of Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008) and Charles Merewether, The Archive (2006), for the College Art Association Reviews, 2009 (by invitation).

• ‘Deconstruction, Critical Theory, and Archival Conflict Today’, Critical Theory: The Text and the World, University of Exeter, September 2009 (invited guest speaker).

• ‘Deconstruction and the Archives of Law’, Philosophy of Laws / Laws of Philosophy seminar series, Birkbeck School of Law, June 2009 (by invitation).

• Chair, Aesthetic Theories of Catastrophe in Fin-de-Siècle, colloquium organised by Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies & Goldmiths Dept. of History, April 2009 (by invitation).

• ‘Consigning Badiou to the Past: the Encyclopaedia and Philosophy’s Gendered Relation to the Endless Archive’, Cultural Politics 5.1, March 2009.

• ‘Capitalism as Bad Sublime’, Trauma and the Sublime, University of Swansea, August 2008.

• ‘Philosophy and the Figure of the Archivist, Archive Fervour / Archive Further: Literature, Archives, and Literary Archives, Aberystwyth University, July 2008.

• ‘Between Endlessness and Destruction: Gissing and the Gender Politics of Libraries’, Cambridge University Department of English Nineteenth Century Seminar Series, May 2008 (by invitation).

• ‘Deleuze, Derrida, Foster, and the “Archival Impulse”’, Location: the Museum, the Academy, the Studio, the Association of Art Historians’ annual conference, April 2008 (by invitation).

• ‘Badiou, Derrida, and Heidegger: the Archive and “The Question of Technology”’, Derrida’s Legacies, hosted by the Forum for European Philosophy, LSE, March 2008 (by invitation).
•  ‘A Bad Book’, review of Jason Powell, Jacques Derrida: A Biography (2006), in Radical Philosophy 143, May / June 2007 (by invitation).
  

• ‘The Gender Politics of Archival Indeterminacy in the Context of 9/11’, Representations of 9/11, London Network for Modern Fiction Studies, March 2007.

• ‘On the Gender Politics of the Archival Sublime’, Taste, Vision, Transcendence: Sublimity 1700-1900, University of Sussex, January 2007.

• ‘The Femininity of the Endless Archive’, The Afterlife of Memory, Congress CATH, University of Leeds, June 2006.

• ‘Ansel Adams: the Gender Politics of Literary-Philosophical and Photographic Archives’, in Cunningham, Fisher and Mays (eds), Twentieth Century Literature and Photography (2005).

• ‘Becoming Dust: Vik Muniz and the Ends of Photography’s Institutional Critique’, in Ten Verses, Summer 2003 (by invitation).