Urmila Seshagiri, professor of English and Distinguished Professor in Humanities, has been awarded the 2026 American Philosophical Society/ British Academy Research Fellowship. This highly competitive joint fellowship supports one to two months of research in archives and libraries in London and Cambridge, where she will work on her book Still Shocking: 21st Encounters with Modernism, currently in progress. Her book will focus on how contemporary literature and culture has inherited the innovation of modernist aesthetics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Seshagiri’s research centers on modernism, contemporary fiction, postcolonial literature, and women’s writing. She has made a profound impact on the field of modernist literature with her discovery of a typescript of Virginia Woolf’s early fiction, The Life of Violet (Princeton UP, 2025) She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell UP, 2010). Along with her new book in progress, she is also working on the first scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf’s memoir. Her edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co. in December 2026.

Seshagiri has also been nominated for a “top-off” fellowship funding award from the American Trust for the British Library, which would further her research in London.

by Sloan Docekal