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 aims to use the tour as a lens for studying African American encounters with the culture of the US South in the post-Great Migration period.
Alongside developing her Leverhulme project, Siân is also in the process of finishing her first monograph, provisionally titled The Serial South: The Little Magazine in the US South, 1921-1945. 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'. 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). Siân has been awarded research grants from Emory University, the University of Virginia, and the British Association of American Studies. Before coming to Swansea, she taught at Cardiff University and the University of Cambridge.