Elizabeth Sheehan, Assistant Professor of English, publishes Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, an interdisciplinary collection of essays which illuminates how fashion shaped concepts and practices of femininity and modernity.

09/10/11

Elizabeth Sheehan, an assistant professor in the department of English who specializes in transatlantic modernism, has recently published a collection of essays that she co-edited with Professor Ilya Parkins, of the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Cultures of Femininity, published by the University Press of New England, places women at the heart of modern culture. Richly interdisciplinary and transatlantic in its scope, the volume demonstrates how fashion shaped and emerged from diverse cultures of femininity and modernity. 

By recovering fashion as a dynamic and far-reaching force in culture and politics, Cultures of Femininity examines the nuanced and conflicted terrain of femininity from the mid-19th to the early 20th century.  Revealing the inextricability of fashion from modern life, the volume argues for placing gender, everyday life and materiality at the forefront of our accounts of modernity. The contributers address diverse aspects of women's engagement with fashion in modernity, through such topics as Sapphic architecture, tea gowns, transnational identity, nursing uniforms, and Harlem Renaissance photographs. 

In addition to co-editing the volume, Elizabeth Sheehan co-wrote its introduction and contributed a chapter that is entitled, "The Face of Fashion: Race and Fantasy in James VanDerZee's Photography and Jessie Fauset's Fiction." 

Cultures of Femininity traces a unique and often surprising history of modernity and its entwinement with the gendered phenomenon of fashion.

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