Unfinished Modernism: Towards New Feminist Methodologies
19 June - 2 July 2022
Biography
Urmila Seshagiri is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is also faculty affiliate in Global Studies and Cinema Studies. The author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell), Professor Seshagiri is preparing the first scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf’s memoir Sketch of the Past (Cornell) a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and Smith College. Her other Woolf editions include a centenary edition of Jacob’s Room (Oxford, forthcoming June 2022) and To the Lighthouse (W. W. Norton, forthcoming 2023). She is at work on a book about the complex legacy of modernist aesthetics titled Still Shocking: Modernism and Fiction in the 21st Century.
Professor Seshagiri’s research has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center, the National Humanities Center, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the University of Tennessee Humanities Center. Her work has appeared in several edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, Modernism/ modernity, and A.S.A.P.|Journal. She is the Out of the Archives Editor for Feminist Modernist Studies and a contributor to LARB: Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.
Professor Seshagiri is widely recognized for her undergraduate and graduate teaching. She has been awarded a 2022-23 Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Associateship to develop the role of the humanities in college education. She is the recipient of an NEH Enduring Questions Grant. The University of Tennessee has honored her with the campus-wide Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the College of Arts and Sciences Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award, and the College of Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Teaching Award. From 2009-20011, Professor Seshagiri held the English Department’s Carroll Distinguished Teaching Chair
Professor Seshagiri is hosted by Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Department of English.
Planned events include:
All activities open to Faculty of Arts students and staff, please email r.kennedy-epstein@bristol.ac.uk if you would like to attend.
30th June, 1 - 5 pm
Seminar: Editing from the Archives
Workshop and discussion between Professor Urmila Seshagiri and Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
For feminist scholars the archive remains a rich cite of discovery. Bringing that material into publication is an often complicated editorial project, but one that has the ability to change how we think about and read a literary period, as well as an author herself. This seminar will focus on the theoretical and practical project of archival recovery and editing: from the questions of authorial intent, to permissions and estates, to placing a recovered text for publication.
24th June, 10.30 - 12 pm, Wills Memorial Building
Keynote, British Association of Modernist Studies Conference (BAMS)
'"Sure and Certain Knowledge" Virginia Woolf's Literary Lives"
What does hope mean in Virginia Woolf’s war-time literary experiments? Woolf’s feminist anti-Bildüngsroman Jacob’s Room, a Great War novel published in 1922 alongside Ulysses and The Waste Land, refuses to offer art as a consolation for history. But Woolf’s unfinished memoir Sketch of the Past (1939-41), a radical reinvention of autobiography composed in secret during German air-raids over England, suggests that aesthetic experience shapes our capacity for survival. On the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis, this talk draws on extensive archival research about Woolf, war, and feminist editing to shed new light on the relationship between art and hope.
24th June, 2.45 - 4.15 pm, Wills Memorial Building
Roundtable: Is the New Modernist Studies Feminist? Histories, Archives, Futures (part of BAMS Conference).
With Alix Beeston (Cardiff), Urmila Seshagiri (UT Knoxville), Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (Bristol), Carrie Preston (Boston University), Sophie Oliver (Liverpool), Mena Mitrano (Ca'Foscari) (24 or 25 June, TBA)
