Urmila Seshagiri is professor of English and Distinguished Professor in Humanities at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell, 2010) and the editor of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (Oxford, 2022) and The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton, 2025). She is writing a study of modernism’s legacies in contemporary fiction.
Urmila Seshagiri
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Writing on Public Books
Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn’t answer.
J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable
What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?
Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously …
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes the transformation of a writer exchanging the patient, polished realism of her first four books for a disquieting abstraction. It is a pleasure to witness sudden […]
Falling Faintly: McEwan’s Latest
In 1893, the Scottish writer William Sharp began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. MacLeod’s poems caught the eye of W. B. Yeats, who admired her lyricism even as he disdained the verse Sharp published under his own name. The elements of this minor literary intrigue—modern poetry and sexual confusion—lie behind Ian McEwan’s equally […]
