Jessica Burstein joins us for a conversation about visual culture and interdisciplinary methodologies with Xiaobing Tang (Asian Languages and Cultures), Andrea Zemgulys (English), Megan Berkobien (Comparative Literature), Grant Mandarino (Art History), and Amanda Greene (English)


Jessica Burstein is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington who works on modernism, fashion, the avant-garde, and prosthetics. Her area of expertise is British literature from the late 19th century through the 1960s, and its West European contexts. She has taught graduate courses on fashion and modernism, the middlebrow, and introductions to modernism. Undergraduate courses range from large lecture introductions to the English major; to smaller seminars on boredom, wandering women, contemporary fiction, blood, privacy, and "Excellent Women"--the latter part of an ongoing interest in domestic fictions and under-read female British writers of the 1910s-1960s. Professor Burstein also teaches modern novel courses, some focusing on adultery, some on embodiment; and major texts courses based on Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. She has published on Dorothy Parker, Wyndham Lewis, crowds, and once in a while in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her book Cold Modernism engages Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Balthus, Hans Bellmer, Henry James, and Coco Chanel, and covers the period 1896-1948. She is also member of the editorial committee of the scholarly journal Modernism/modernity.