Dr. Elizabeth Outka
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Profile
Elizabeth Outka’s scholarship and teaching focus on twentieth-century literature and culture. Her latest, award-winning book, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Columbia University Press 2020), investigates how one of the deadliest plagues in history—the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic—silently reshaped the modernist era, infusing everything from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the writing of Virginia Woolf and W. B. Yeats, to the emergence of viral zombies and the popularity of séances. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She has written on topics ranging from consumer culture, to postcolonial representations of trauma, to disability studies. Her first book, Consuming Traditions (Oxford University Press 2009), analyzes how the marketing of authenticity in turn-of-the-century Britain offers a new way to understand literary modernism and its complex negotiation of tradition and novelty. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Modernism/modernity, NOVEL, and Contemporary Literature, as well as many edited collections.
She teaches courses on modernism, twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, the contemporary novel, the literatures of war, environmental literature, social change and modern drama, and women in literature.
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Grants and Fellowships
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2016-2017.
Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, University of Richmond, 2016.
Enhanced Sabbatical Grant, University of Richmond, 2015-2016.
Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, University of Richmond, 2015.
Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, University of Richmond, 2014.
Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, University of Richmond, 2013.
Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, University of Richmond, 2012.
Faculty Research Grant, University of Richmond, 2011.
Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, University of Richmond, 2010.
Fellowship, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, University of Richmond, 2009.
The James D. Kennedy, III Endowed Faculty Fellowship, University of the South, 2006-2008.
John B. Stephenson Fellowship, Appalachian College Association, 2004.
Academic Initiative Grant, University of the South, 2004.
Faculty Research and Travel Grant, University of the South, 2003.
Elizabeth Garret Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2000.
William B. Christian Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2000.
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Awards
State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, 2024
Transatlantic Studies Association-Cambridge University Press Book Award, 2021
Distinguished Scholarship Award, University of Richmond, 2021
South Atlantic Modern Language Association 2019 Book Award, Viral Modernism, 2020<
Distinguished Educator Award, University of Richmond, 2015.
All-University Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in Arts and Humanities, University of Virginia, 1998.
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, English Department, University of Virginia, 1997-1998.
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Grants and Fellowships
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Publications
Books
Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Columbia University Press, 2020. Modernist Latitudes series. Simultaneous hardcover and paperback.
Winner of the Transatlantic Studies Association-Cambridge University Press Book Prize and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Book Award.
Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford University Press, 2009. Paperback edition 2012.
Journal Articles“Grievability, COVID-19, and the Modernists’ Pandemic.” Modernism/modernity PrintPlus. Vol. 5, cycle 1 (May 2020).
“‘The Wood for the Coffins Ran Out’: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.” Modernism/modernity, 21.4 (2014): 937-960.
“Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety.” Afterword for Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics. Ed. Tammy Clewell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 252-261.
“Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, and Actualized Metaphors in Mrs. Dalloway and Raymond.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 46.2 (2013) 253-274.
“Trauma and Temporal Hybridity in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Contemporary Literature. 52.1 (2011) 21-53.
“Crossing the Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity, and the Commodified Authentic.” Modernism/modernity. 12.2 (2005): 311-328.
“Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 36.3 (2003): 330-350.
Book Chapters“Mrs. Dalloway and the Influenza Pandemic.” Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Anne Fernald. New York: Norton, 2021, 301-309. Excerpt from “Wood for the Coffins Ran Out.”
“Disability, Illness, and Pain.” In The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne E. Fernald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 504-520.
“Teaching the First World War through Community-Based Learning.” Book chapter in Options for Teaching Representations of the First World War. Eds. Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee. NYC: Modern Language Association, 2017. 302-307.
“The Transitory Space of Night and Day.” Book chapter for A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jessica Berman. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 55-66.
“Consumer Culture.” Essay in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture. Ed. Celia Marshik. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2014. 81-95.
“The Shop Windows Were Full of Sparkling Chains: Consumer Desire and Woolf’s Night and Day." Book chapter in Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds. Ed. Jessica Berman and Jane Goldman. New York: Pace UP, 2001. 229-235.
Additional Publications"Reconsidering the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic in the Age of COVID-19.” Roundtable print essay with scholars Nancy Bristow, Tom Ewing, Joseph Gabriel, Benjamin Montoya, and Elizabeth Outka. Ed. Christopher McKnight Nichols. JGAPE:The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Cambridge University Press journal: 19.4 (October 2020): 642-672.
ReviewsReview of Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, edited by Michael H. Whitworth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. Woolf Studies Annual. 26 (2020): 143-145.
“Violent Ends, Modernist Means.” Review of Sarah Cole’s At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 48.2 (2015): 313-316.
Review of Jane Elizabeth Fisher’s Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History. 43.3 (2014): 37-43.
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