Jessica Berman's new book: Virginia Woolf in global contexts

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 16:36:58 -0400
ovpr-news-2016

This story first appeared on news.umbc.edu and was written by Max Cole.

Jessica Berman, director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities and professor of English, has published a new edited volume of 33 essays by leading scholars on the life, work, and multiple contexts for Virginia Woolf’s writing.

The book, titled A Companion to Virginia Woolf, was published last month by Wiley. It is one of the first to examine Woolf in global contexts with essays on “Reading Woolf in India,” “Woolf in Hispanic Countries,” and “Woolf, the Hogarth Press and Global Print Culture.” It approaches Woolf’s writing from a variety of perspectives, including colonialism, modernism, queer theory, and digital humanities, among other disciplines.

Berman introduces the volume and also writes an essay in the book on Woolf’s Three Guineas.

The work has already received strong praise, including a review from the University of Oxford’s David Bradshaw: “A probing and compendious crow’s nest of a handbook that splendidly epitomises the global reach and indisputable genius of the, full-range of Virginia Woolf’s writings. Diligently up-to-the-minute while equally alert to the deeper histories of her critical heritage, it deserves to become a standard primer for scholars and general readers alike.”

Berman’s teaching and research interests include modernism from a transnational perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and literary theory. Her previous books include Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2011), and Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge University Press, 2001, paper 2006). She is second vice-president of the Modernist Studies Association, to succeed to vice-president (2015-16) and president (2016-17).

Read more about her work on the English department website.

Pictured: Jessica Berman speaking at a Dresher Center for the Humanities event. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.