Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Professor of English. She is also affiliate faculty in Global Studies and Cinema Studies. The author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell), 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. She is the editor of Virginia Woolf’s The Life of Violet (Princeton), Jacob’s Room (Oxford), and To the Lighthouse (Norton; in preparation), 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 National Humanities Center, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She serves as ‘Out of the Archives’ Editor for Feminist Modernist Studies, and her work has appeared in 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.

Professor Seshagiri has received the campus-wide Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the College of Arts and Sciences’ highest teaching honor, the James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award. She is also the recipient of 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. In 2015, she received an NEH Enduring Questions Grant to develop an undergraduate 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.