Anne E. Fernald
Visiting Research Fellow
Background
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.
Teaching
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.
Research
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.
