UMass Boston


Treasurer, Department Chairs Union (DCU)

Biography

My work focuses on topics in modernist literature including empathy, silence, nostalgia, humility, self-elegy, modernist mapping, the spaces of World War I, and masochism, and I teach and write about writers including Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Zora Neale Hurston, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Borden. My monograph, Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny, came out with Cambridge University Press (2019). I am currently working on a project about reading for “unmastery” in texts by modernist women writers.

 

Area of Expertise

Modernist literature; modern poetry; Virginia Woolf; empathy and literature; modernism and elegy; literature of World War I

 

Degrees

Ph.D., English, University of Michigan (2006)

BA, English, Swarthmore College (1998)

 

Professional Publications & Contributions

Book:

Peer-reviewed articles and chapters:

  • “Unmastery: Woolf’s Far Side of Language and the Pedagogy of the Pause.” Feminist Modernist Studies 5.1 (2022) 106-123.
  • “Mapping, Perception, WWI: Military Strategy, Poetic Voice, and Fictional Perspectives.” Teaching Representations of World War One. Eds. Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee. MLA Press, 2017. 185-192.
  • “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and New Subjectivities.” Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land. Ed. Gabrielle McIntire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 162-177.
  • “Empathy, Trauma, and the Space of War in Parade’s End.” War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End, and Psychology. Eds. Rob Hawkes and Ashley Chantler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 50-62.
  • “Poetry of the Great War.” A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Eds. David Chinitz and Gail McDonald. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 222-33.
  • “Dissolving Landscapes: Auden’s Protean Nostalgia.” Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics. Ed. Tammy Clewell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 166-180.
  • “The Self-Elegy: Narcissistic Nostalgia or Proleptic Postmortem?” A Companion to Poetic Genre. Ed. Erik Martiny. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (December 2011). 93-103.
  • “Hardy’s Geography of Narrative Empathy,” Studies in the Novel 43.2 (Summer 2011): 179-199.
  • “‘The Place on the Map’: Geography and Meter in Hardy’s Elegies.” Modernism/Modernity 16.3 (September 2009): 543-64.
  • “Mourning and Moving On: Life after War in Ford Madox Ford’s The Last Post.” Modernism and Mourning. Ed. Patricia Rae. Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. 154-167.
  • “Taking Note: Text and Context in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.’” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (March 2007): 137-158.
  • “Masochistic Modernisms: A Reading of Eliot and Woolf.” The Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (Spring 2005): 25-43.

 

Eve Sorum's CV.

 

Additional Information

Graduate courses include:

Modernism in Literature, Modern Poetry, the Modern British Novel, Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, and Modernism and Visual Culture

Undergraduate courses include:

The Modern Period, Virginia Woolf, Modernism and World War I, Transatlantic Modernisms, Disruptive Women, Modernism and Visual Culture, Five British Authors, Introduction to Literary Studies, among others.