Lisi Schoenbach

Associate Professor

401B McClung Tower
Phone: (865) 974-4839
aschoenb@utk.edu

Biography

Lisi Schoenbach works on twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on modernism, pragmatism, and political theory. She is the author of Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford, 2012) and is currently at work on a new book project entitled Modernism and the Democratic State.

Dr. Schoenbach’s scholarship has been characterized by a consistent desire to represent habits, institutions, bureaucracies, and even the state not simply as repressive or deadening forces, but as ubiquitous facts inseparable from “authentic” experience. She teaches courses in modernism, the modern novel, and literary theory. Recent courses include Traveling Modernism, Law and Literature, Joyce and Modernism, Revolution and Institution, Modernism and Everyday Life, Theories of Modernity, and Literary Venice.

In recent years she has served as Faculty Fellow for Curriculum in the University of Tennessee Chancellor’s Honors Program. She has been the recipient of a College of Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Teaching Award and the Department of English Hodges Award for Teaching Excellence.

Education

• A.B., Harvard University
• M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia

Publications

• Pragmatic Modernism. Modernist Literature and Culture Series, Oxford University Press, 2012.
• “A Jamesian State: The American Scene and ‘the Working of Democratic Institutions,’” The Henry James Review, February 2009.
• “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism” (review), The Henry James Review, 2009.
• “‘Peaceful and Exciting’: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s Pragmatic Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 11.2 (2004): 239-259.