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WORK TITLE: THE MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY
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PERSONAL
Uses gender-neutral pronouns.
EDUCATION:Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S., 2001; Brown University, M.A., 2005, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, instructor, 2010-16; University of Birmingham, England, senior lecturer. Previously, worked in campaign financing in San Francisco, CA and New York, NY.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including The Atlantic, Disclaimer, Toast, and Public Books.
SIDELIGHTS
Mo Moulton is a writer and educator. They hold a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Brown University. After obtaining the latter degree, Moulton became an instructor at Harvard University. They held that position for six years. Moulton has also served as a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, England. Previously, they worked in campaign finance in San Francisco, CA and New York, NY.
In 2014, Moulton released their first book, a nonfiction volume called Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England. She focuses on the experiences of people of Irish descent living in England, as well as on England’s views on the Irish during that time period.
Reviewing the volume on the Irish Times website, Enda Delaney commented: “It’s a riveting read, deeply researched and stylishly written, with extensive use of archival material. Moulton clearly has an eye for fascinating or quirky details, such as the Linguaphone Irish-language records made available to the Irish in England to learn the language or the macabre group concerned with drawing attention to Irish graves in England.” Delaney also described the volume as “a very sophisticated debut book.”
The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women finds Moulton discussing the life and relationships of Sayers, a writer who became well known for her “Lord Peter Wimsey” detective series. She argues that Sayers and her friends helped one another by collaborating and offering creative and career advice. Among the friends of Sayers who are profiled in the book are Dorothea Hanbury Rowe, Chris Barnett Frankenburg, and Muriel St. Clare Byrne.
A Kirkus Reviews critic offered a mixed assessment of The Mutual Admiration Society. The critic suggested: “A surfeit of prosaic details about [Sayers’s] friends and their outliers makes for a slow-paced story.” However, the critic added: “Still, Moulton offers telling glimpses of Sayers.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2019, review of The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women.
ONLINE
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (August 9, 2014), Enda Delaney, review of Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England.
Mo Moulton, http://momoulton.com/ (October 16, 2019).
University of Birmingham, Department of History, https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/ (October 16, 2019), author faculty profile.
Mo Moulton is currently a lecturer in the history department of the University of Birmingham. They earned their PhD in history from Brown University in 2010 and taught in the History & Literature program at Harvard University for six years. Their previous book, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England, was named a 2014 “Book of the Year” by History Today and was the runner-up for the Royal History Society’s 2015 Whitfield Prize for first book in British or Irish history. Moulton regularly writes for outlets such as The Atlantic, Public Books, Disclaimer Magazine, and the Toast. They live in London, UK.
Dr Mo Moulton is a historian of 20th century Britain and Ireland, interested in gender, sexuality, and colonialism/postcolonialism. They work as a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Birmingham, where they are the Director of the Modern British Studies Centre. Moulton earned their PhD from Brown University and spent several years working in the History & Literature program at Harvard University.
Moulton is the author of two books:
The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (November 2019, Basic Books [US] & Little, Brown [UK]). Buy the US edition from Powells, indiebound, Barnes & Noble, or your preferred shop or online retailer. Buy the UK edition from hive, Wordery, Waterstones, or your preferred shop or online retailer.
Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (May 2014, Cambridge University Press)
Dr Mo Moulton
Department of History
Senior Lecturer in the History of Race and Empire
Contact details
Email
m.moulton@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@hammock_tussock
View my research portal
I am a historian of 20th century Britain and Ireland, interested in politics, economics, culture, queer theory, and colonialism/postcolonialism.
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Qualifications
PhD, Brown University, 2010
A.M., Brown University, 2005
S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001
Biography
After studying history at MIT (a surprising but happy choice), I worked in the non-profit sector, mainly on campaign financing, in San Francisco and New York. I earned a PhD, funded in part by the SSRC and a Mellon grant, from Brown University under the supervision of Professor Deborah Cohen. From 2010 to 2016, I taught at Harvard University’s History and Literature program.
For more information, please visit: http://momoulton.com/
Teaching
I convene the MA in Modern British Studies. At the undergraduate level, I teach 'Gross Indecency to Gay Marriage: Gender and Sexual Minorities 1885 to the present' and Research Methods.
Postgraduate supervision
I am interested in projects relating to Britain and Ireland, roughly 1890-1950, and connecting to my main areas of research.
Find out more - our PhD History page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.
Research
Both of my current research areas take the first decades of the twentieth century as a moment of intense experimentation and transformation around ideas of community and identity.
The first, “Democracy and State Direction: Practical Experiments in Political Economy” is about economic citizenship and decolonization. It uses the curious story of ubiquitous agricultural co-operatives in last decades of the British Empire to ask how the co-operative became a method for producing a certain type of economic citizen. Ultimately, it seeks to provide a new framework for understanding how current ideas about international development, including the primacy of the market and the centrality of the individual entrepreneur, came to be enshrined.
The second, a reaction to current debates about the ontology of the couple and queer forms of kinship and family-making, explore the strategies and identities of queer non-monogamy in the 1920s-1940s.
Other activities
All of my writing and other miscellaneous projects, both academic and non-academic, can be found at my personal website.
Publications
Select publications
Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (Little, Brown / Basic Books, 2019)
Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
With Enda Delaney, Ciaran O’Neill, and Michael de Nie, “Roundtable Discussion: Teaching Transnational Irish History,” Eire-Ireland (vol. 51 no. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2016)
“‘You Have Votes and Power’: Women’s Political Engagement with the Irish Question in Britain, 1919-21,” Journal of British Studies Vol. 52: 1 (Jan. 2013)
“Bricks and Flowers: Representations of gender and queer life in interwar Britain,” in British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Brian Lewis (Manchester University Press, 2013)
For a full list of publications, please visit: http://momoulton.com/
QUOTED: "A surfeit of prosaic details about [Sayers's] friends and their outliers makes for a slow-paced story."
"Still, Moulton offers telling glimpses of Sayers."
Moulton, Mo THE MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $32.00 11, 5 ISBN: 978-1-5416-4447-2
A group portrait of a celebrated crime writer and her Oxford friends.
When Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) arrived at Somerville College in 1912, women were second-class citizens, able to take classes but not earn degrees. Undaunted, the future novelist and other female students read their works in progress aloud--with "no false modesty or feminine shame"--at meetings of a group that Sayers dubbed the Mutual Admiration Society. In this well-researched group biography, Moulton (History/Univ. of Birmingham; Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England, 2014) follows four pillars of the "society" as they challenged stereotypes of women throughout their lives: Muriel St. Clare Byrne, a distinguished historian and playwright; Charis Barnett Frankenburg, a birth control pioneer who wrote popular child-rearing manuals; Dorothea Hanbury Rowe, the co-founder of an influential amateur theater company; and Sayers, the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories. Dividing its focus among the women, the book shows how they helped one another as friends, intellectual sounding boards, and, in the case of Sayers and Byrne, collaborators on the play Busman's Honeymoon. The drawback to this approach is that Sayers was the star from the start, and a surfeit of prosaic details about her friends and their outliers makes for a slow-paced story, further encumbered with redundancies (most Wimsey novels are "enduring classics"), retrofitted jargon (the women risked "marginality within the gender politics of their era"), and unedifying exposition (Frankenburg found it "enormously stressful" to have three sons in uniform in World War II). Still, Moulton offers telling glimpses of Sayers, whether she's making a daring plan to hide her son born out of wedlock or exulting when her agent sells Whose Body? to Boni & Liveright: "I am rich! I am famous!" Moulton also has a firm answer to the question of who inspired Lord Peter: "The early Wimsey is, above all, an idealized version of DLS herself, with bits and pieces of her experiences and her fantasies woven in to make a genuinely fictional character."
Lord Peter Wimsey's creator upstages her companions as they blaze trails for women.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moulton, Mo: THE MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964362/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=56307068. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964362
QUOTED: "It’s a riveting read, deeply researched and stylishly written, with extensive use of archival material. Moulton clearly has an eye for fascinating or quirky details, such as the Linguaphone Irish-language records made available to the Irish in England to learn the language or the macabre group concerned with drawing attention to Irish graves in England."
"a very sophisticated debut book."
Entangled connections: Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England
Review: A superb new book focusing on people often excluded from the Irish historical narrative
Cultural tourism: a travel poster from 1923. Photograph: SSPL/Getty
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Enda Delaney
Sat, Aug 9, 2014, 01:00
First published:
Sat, Aug 9, 2014, 01:00
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Book Title:
Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England
ISBN-13:
978-1107052680
Author:
Mo Moulton
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Guideline Price:
Sterling65.00
Growing up in Ireland during the late 1970s and early 1980s, England featured heavily in our consciousness. Then as now, we rarely thought of Scotland, Wales or indeed Britain as a unitary state. It was England, not Britain. Living on the east coast, and being by virtue of geography West Brits, ensured we had access to that most corrosive form of British cultural imperialism: the BBC.
After school we watched a daily diet of Jackanory, Play School and, most dangerous of all, Blue Peter, with its desirable badges and values of good citizenship, fair play and self-discipline.
The weekend opened with Swap Shop, presented by Noel Edmonds, and also featured Jimmy Savile’s popular Saturdayevening programme, Jim’ll Fix It. We earnestly hoped that he would fix it for us and make our dreams come true one day, but he never picked Irish children – fortuitously, given what we now know about his brutal sexual abuse of children. We were hooked on this diet of entertainment and unsubtle didactic learning – mostly because of the glamour of it all. No wonder RTÉ seemed a poor relation. We felt deep sympathy for people who could watch only the national broadcaster.
Of England itself we knew little. At school the “auld enemy” was wheeled in and out of the story of Ireland’s dramatic history like the evil character of a Shakespearian tragedy. A few courageous English tourists came to Ireland in the 1980s despite the hostile political climate after the deaths of the Maze hunger strikers.
We had friends and relatives in the “land of the Sassenach”, of course, many who had left Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. The packages they sent came bedecked with stamps bearing Queen Elizabeth’s head, heralding the arrival of desirable objects that were unavailable in Ireland.
We watched Top of the Pops and followed English soccer. We loved everything English, yet we also despised England, especially politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, and everything that country represented in our own history. We wanted to be modern like the English but also to be different.
Hybrid heritage
One revelation about our hybrid heritage occurred when out cycling with my siblings along the back roads of Porterstown, near Clonsilla in west Dublin. In a wall we came across a small postbox decorated in the usual bright green. On closer inspection things were not as they first seemed. The royal cipher covered with layers of paint was still visible, and it read “VR”. I asked my father later what this stood for – he was a civil servant in the department of posts and telegraphs – and he told me that it was Victoria Regina, or Queen Victoria. It struck me as odd that a postbox in our locality should have the name of a British monarch on it.
That postbox, long since gone, part of the collateral damage of the tsunami of housing development in west Dublin during the boom, is a useful reminder of the entangled connections at the heart of Mo Moulton’s wonderful new book about the relationship between Ireland and England in the 1920s and 1930s.
She discusses some conventional subjects, such as the War of Independence and the Civil War, but in an entirely new way, investigating how these events were seen in England. Her discussions of “war tourism” – that is, the published accounts of visitors and travellers who came to Ireland during the “Troubles” – are very original, and she shows how knowledge of Ireland was filtered through writers and journalists to the wider English public.
She’s not particularly interested in the high politics of constitutional intrigue, though she covers some of these dimensions. Neither is the focus on personalities. This book is about people often excluded from the Irish historical narrative, weighted as it is towards “great men”. Migrants, women, loyalists and ex-soldiers feature prominently in Moulton’s account, and that is to be welcomed. They were citizens of both but never fully part of either society.
What she is essentially concerned with recovering is the deep and all-pervasive web of connections between Ireland and England from the start of the War of Independence, in 1919, until the outbreak of the second World War, in 1939. After independence, in 1922, the long-standing ties of people, institutions and ideas that linked the two counties into a political but not cultural union did not disappear overnight.
Some of the most original chapters chart the experiences of those for whom this change was deeply unsettling, especially the Anglo-Irish and other loyalists.
Moulton is especially good at recreating the world of the displaced Anglo-Irish, using their writings, including diaries and letters, to give a sense of their indeterminate status in both Ireland and Britain.
Major contribution
The second part of the book is mostly concerned with Irish people in England.
Moulton argues persuasively for seeing English views of Ireland as intimately tied up with reactions to Irish migrants living there. Her fluent analysis of the ambiguities of being Irish in interwar England is a major contribution to knowledge about Britain’s largest immigrant group for most of the last century.
She is especially good at explaining why the Irish never formed a strong political voice in Britain, seeing this largely as down to organisational failure and a lack of motivation. She demonstrates that even though it was widely assumed that the Irish integrated within English society, they in fact exhibited all the characteristics of a distinctive subculture, based largely around Catholicism and a sense of acute difference from the majority culture.
It’s a riveting read, deeply researched and stylishly written, with extensive use of archival material. Moulton clearly has an eye for fascinating or quirky details, such as the Linguaphone Irish-language records made available to the Irish in England to learn the language or the macabre group concerned with drawing attention to Irish graves in England. In a very sophisticated debut book, she has demonstrated that Ireland did not disappear from the English imagination in the 1920s and 1930s, as is widely assumed. The “repressed island” would retain its place in English consciousness for generations to come.
Sat, Aug 9, 2014, 01:00
First published:
Sat, Aug 9, 2014, 01:00