Professor Anne E. Fernald
I am a scholar of British and global modernism with a specialty in 20th-century British women writers, especially Virginia Woolf. My writing has been divided between traditional critical writing, editorial work, and writing for a more general audience. I prepared a textual edition of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press and then adapted it for the Norton Critical Edition of Mrs. Dalloway. I am the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf. My first book was Virginia Woolf: Feminism, and the Reader (Palgrave 2006). I was co-editor of Modernism/modernity 2019-23. I am also an editor of The Norton Reader, an anthology of essays widely used in university and advanced secondary school writing classes. I served as Special Advisor to the Provost for Faculty Development from 2018-23. In that capacity, I was the inaugural faculty co-chair for the university’s diversity council and co-led the university’s support for teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, hosting a podcast and multiple professional development sessions. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, I was educated at Wellesley College and Yale University.
I am currently finishing a collective biography for a general audience, Changing Her Mind: How Eight Women Artists Navigated the Modern World. At Merton, I will be researching Vera Brittain. Although Brittain was a copious documenter of her own life, she did not keep a diary during her years at Somerville College, Oxford. I will be working to fill in that gap with an eye to an article on Brittain at Oxford.
My research interest include Woolf, women writers of the 20th century, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, feminist and gender theory, intertextuality, and the essay and experimental nonfiction forms. I’m rekindling a dormant interest in law and literature.
At Fordham University, I often teach undergraduate classes on intertextuality to first- and second-years. Sometimes, those are classes on 20th and 21st century rewritings of Homer’s Odyssey; sometimes, I teach “The Tortured Poet’s Department,” a cook’s tour of Taylor Swift’s songs and the many poets she alludes to therein. I also regularly teach classes and the undergraduate and postgraduate level on World War I, peace and war, modernism, and Woolf. I will be teaching a law and literature class in the fall of 2025.
“From Mentor to Supplicant,” Modernism/modernity, PrintPlus, (online), January 29, 2025: 9.2.
with Sarah Cole, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and Urmila Seshagiri, “On Jacob’s Room: The Figure and Ground of Protest.” Modern Fiction Studies, (70.3) Fall 2024. 385-408.
“Not Quite So Kind: Mrs. Dalloway and the Limits of Kindness, Modern Fiction Studies, (70.1) Spring 2024. 30-54.
“What Is War,” Approaches to Teaching World War One. Ed. Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee. New York: MLA, 2017. 17-27.
“Woolf’s Essays, Diaries, and Letters,” A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jessica Berman. Blackwell. 2016. 177-88.
“Taxi: The Modern Taxicab as Feminist Heterotopia.” Modernist Cultures 9:2 (Fall 2014) 213-232.
“In the Great Green Room,” Public Books. November 17, 2015. Web.
“My Favorite Footnote to Mrs. Dalloway.” Fifteeneightyfour blog (Cambridge University Press). February 2, 2015. Web.
Editor, The Norton Critical Edition of Mrs. Dalloway, 2021.
Editor, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, 2021.
Editor, The Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway, 2014.
Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Palgrave 2006).
Co-editor, The Norton Reader, 16th edition, with Melissa Goldthwaite and Joe Bizup. 2023.
