Rate My Professor Urmila Seshagiri

Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Professor of English in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with affiliate appointments in Global Studies and Cinema Studies. She earned a PhD and MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research centers on modernism, contemporary fiction, women's writing, race and aesthetics in modernist literature, and metamodernism. Seshagiri is the author of the book Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2010), which explores racial discourse shaping canonical British modernist works. She edited Virginia Woolf's The Life of Violet (Princeton University Press, 2025), Jacob’s Room (Oxford University Press), and is preparing editions of Woolf's To the Lighthouse (W. W. Norton & Co., anticipated 2026) and A Sketch of the Past (Princeton University Press). Her peer-reviewed articles include “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution” with David James (PMLA, vol. 129, no. 1, 2014), “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse” (Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2004; recipient of the Margaret Church Memorial Award), “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century” (Modernism/modernity, vol. 13, no. 3, 2006), and “Modernity’s (Yellow) Perils: Dr. Fu-Manchu and English Race-Paranoia” (Cultural Critique, no. 62, 2006).

Seshagiri has received the 2026 American Philosophical Society/British Academy Fellowship for Research, American Philosophical Society Franklin Grants (2023, 2020, 2017), National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2017) and Enduring Questions Grant (2015-17), Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grant (2022), and Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship (2020-21). Teaching awards include the James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award (2020), Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2007), College of Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Teaching Award (2005), and Department of English Hodges Award for Excellence in Teaching (2004). She held the Lindsay Young Professorship (2021-23) and Carroll Distinguished Teaching Chair (2009-11). Seshagiri serves as ‘Out of the Archives’ Editor for Feminist Modernist Studies and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Edinburgh University Press's Virginia Woolf – Variations series and Bloomsbury Academic's Metamodernism series. She has guest-edited special issues such as Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis (Modernism/modernity Print-Plus, 2017) and contributed to Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement.