FACULTY
 

Jessica Berman

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 Jessica Berman is Associate Professor of English, Affiliate Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Chair of English. She holds a bachelor´s degree in history from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. Her teaching and research interests include modernism from a trans-national perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and literary theory. She also has a special interest in questions of politics in connection to twentieth-century narrative. Her book, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community which has recently been re-issued in paperback (Cambridge University Press, 2001, 2006), explores the connection between community and cosmopolitanism in the writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Her new project examines the connection between ethics and politics in early twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Mulk Raj Anand,  Cornelia Sorabji and Max Aub. An essay from that project, "Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf," appeared in the special 2004 anniversary issue of Modern Fiction Studies. Another, “Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement” appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Modernism/Modernity.

 

Jessica Berman was the organizer of the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, "Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds," which took place at UMBC in 2000 and a co-editor (with Jane Goldman) of the Selected Papers from that conference (Pace University Press, 2001). She has been the recipient of a Whiting Foundation fellowship and the Richard Halliday Prize of the Henry James Society, among other awards and fellowships. She has been a teaching fellow in the UMBC Humanities Scholars Program, a Bearman Foundation fellow for her first-year seminar, and was a Provost’s Research Fellow in Spring 2007.  She has served as Acting Director of Women´s Studies (Fall 2003), as Chair of the UMBC Research Council (2003), and as a member of the University-wide Planning and Leadership Team (2005).