Professor Outka’s research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and culture. Her new book, Consuming Traditions, is on the marketing of authenticity in turn-of-the-century Britain. The book explores how the selling of objects and places allegedly free of commercial taint marks a crucial turn in modern culture and offers a new way to understand literary modernism and its complex negotiation of tradition and novelty. She investigates works by a wide range of writers, including Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Her current book project, Haunted Modernities: War, Plague, and Magic in the Early Twentieth Century, explores trauma, metaphor and WWI.