English

Urmila Seshagiri

Urmila Seshagiri

headshot photo
ADDRESS
412 McClung Tower

Urmila Seshagiri

Professor

Modernism, Contemporary Fiction, Postcolonial Literature, Women’s Writing

Urmila Seshagiri is Professor of English and affiliate faculty in Global Studies and Cinema Studies. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell, 2010) and the editor of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (Oxford, 2022). She is writing a book about the complex legacy of modernist aesthetics in contemporary literature and culture, provisionally titled Still Shocking: 21st-Century Encounters with Modernism, and she is preparing the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s memoir A Sketch of the Past (Cornell). 

Professor Seshagiri’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the National Humanities Center, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. At the University of Tennessee, she has been a Fellow of the UT Humanities Center. She serves as ‘Out of the Archives’ Editor for Feminist Modernist Studies, and her work appears in a range of journals and edited collections including PMLA, Modernism/ modernity, Cultural Critique, and The Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf. She is a contributor to Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In 2020, Urmila Seshagiri received the highest teaching honor in the College of Arts and Sciences, the James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2015, she received an NEH Enduring Questions Grant to develop a course called “What is Duty?” for the University of Tennessee Chancellor’s Honors Program. From 2009-2011, she held the English Department’s Carroll Distinguished Teaching Chair. She is the recipient of the campus-wide Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the College of Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Teaching Award, the Department of English Hodges Award for Teaching Excellence, and the Graduate Students in English Outstanding Teaching Award.

Education

    • M.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois
    • B.A., Oberlin College

Specialties

Modernism, Contemporary Fiction, Postcolonial Literature, Women’s Writing

Publications

Selected Publications

  • Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2010.
  • Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room. [1922] Introduced and Annotated for Oxford World’s Classics. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022.
  • Virginia Woolf, The Life of Violet [1908]. Transcribed, Introduced, and Annotated for Princeton University Press. Forthcoming 2025.
  • “Strange God: Now, Eliot.” Afterword for Eliot Now. Eds. David Chinitz and Megan Quigley. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. 221-31.
  • “On Jacob’s Room: The Figure and Ground of Protest.” With Sarah Cole, Anne Fernald, and Paul St. Amour. Modern Fiction Studies. Special Issue: Women Thinking in Public, eds. Debra Rae Cohen and Catherine Keyser. Vol. 70. No. 3 (Fall 2024): 385-408.
  • “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse.” In Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Homans. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. 312-26. Excerpted and reprinted from Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010).
  • “Virginia Woolf: Family and Place.” The Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Fernald. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021.7-26.
  •  “Language is a Place: A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri.” LARB: Los Angeles Review of Books. May 22, 2021.
  • “Encounters with Modernism: Ian McEwan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and the Ethics of Abstraction.” In Modernism’s Contemporary Affect, ed. David James. Modernism/modernity Print-Plus. Vol. 3, Cycle 4. December 11, 2018.
  •  “Time is a Feminist Medium: A Roundtable Conversation with Chitra Ganesh, Aditi Sriram, and Kelly Tsai.” Guest editor, moderator, and author of Introduction. A.S.A.P.| The Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Vol. 3. No. 1 (January 2018): 13-39.
  • “Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis.”  Modernism/modernity: Print-Plus. Guest editor and author of Introduction. (Contributors: Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Anne Fernald, Cherene Sherrard Johnson, Madelyn Detloff, Ewa Ziarek) August 7, 2017.
  • “Race and Modernist Form.” In Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2016. 424-34. Excerpted and reprinted from Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010).
  • “Metamodernism: Narratives of Revolution and Continuity.” With David James. PMLA. Vol. 129: No. 1 (January 2014). 87-100. Reprinted in The New Modernist Studies Reader: An Anthology of Essential Criticism. Eds. Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 318-33.
  • “The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus.” Contemporary Literature. Vol. 54: No. 3 (Winter 2013). 643-53.
  • “Making It New: Persephone Books and The Modernist Project.” Special Issue: Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 59: No. 2 (Summer 2013). 241-87.