Seshagiri Named Distinguished Professor in Humanities
Urmila Seshagiri, professor in the UT Department of English, has been named a Distinguished Professor in Humanities. Seshagiri specializes in modernism, contemporary fiction, and women’s writing.
Seshagiri has made a profound impact on literary scholarship. She discovered, edited, and published Virginia Woolf’s early comic fantasia, The Life of Violet (Princeton University Press, 2025). She is also the editor of Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (Oxford University Press, 2022) and the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s memoir, A Sketch of the Past (Princeton, forthcoming 2027). She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2010). Her research focuses on modernist aesthetics and how contemporary culture has inherited the innovation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her book-in-progress is called Still Shocking: 21st-Century Encounters with Modernism.
In 2023, Seshagiri received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Grant. She held a Lindsay Young Professorship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from 2021-23, and her research has been supported by the British Academy, the NEH, the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, and the New York Public Library.
In addition to being an integral part of the English department, Seshagiri also has affiliate roles in the Global Studies and Cinema Studies programs. She is the creator of Odysseys, an innovative program that connects first-year University of Tennessee students with exceptional professors. She has also created English 475: The Big Ears Festival, a course that gives students the opportunity to attend an annual world-class cultural event held in downtown Knoxville. Seshagiri has won multiple awards for her teaching, including an NEH Enduring Questions Grant in 2017, and, in 2020, the College of Arts and Sciences’ highest teaching recognition, the James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award.
Distinguished Professors in Humanities at UT are faculty recognized for their exceptional contributions to teaching, research, and academia who demonstrate academic excellence, leadership, and a significant impact on their field of study. This achievement supports Seshagiri in her continued work and writing on contemporary literature, while honoring all she has accomplished thus far.
by Sloan Docekal