faculty
Jessica Berman is Associate Professor of English, Affiliate Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Affiliate Associate Professor of Language, Literacy and Culture, 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 transnational perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and literary theory. She also has a special interest in questions of politics in connection to twentieth-century world literature.
Her new book, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2011), 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, Max Aub and Meridel Le Sueur, and argues for an expansive, transnational approach to the definition of literary modernism. Her previous book, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge University Press, 2001, paper 2006), explored the connection between community and cosmopolitanism in the writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. She has published essays in such journals as Modernism/Modernity and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as in such influential volumes as Geomodernisms (Doyle and Winkiel, eds) and Disciplining Modernism (Caughie, ed). She is currently at work on a book-length project entitled, "Media Migrations: Modernism, Exile and Twentieth-Century Media," The book will investigate the role of exiles and migrants in the development of new media throughout the twentieth century, with chapters on radio, film, television, and digital media.
Berman co-edits, with Paul Saint-Amour, the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press. She serves on the Board of the American Comparative Literature Association and on the Modernist Studies Association program committee. She 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, a Newberry Library short-term 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).
