B.A., Brown University, 2014; Ph.D., Indiana University, 2024
Zoë L. Henry (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, with research and teaching interests in African American literature, diaspora studies, global modernism, gender and sexuality, feminist theory, and dance and performance.
Her first book project, The Public Interior: Modernism, Theatricality, and Interracial Aesthetics, explores how women across a mixed-race modernist archive used the resources of the city to remain “private in public,” thus desegregating the historiography of modernist literature. It develops a notion of privacy that moves beyond the domestic to intertwine with law, eros, and the psyche, arguing that privacy’s denial to Black and mixed-race women can be understood as an afterlife of slavery, unfolding in the twentieth-century metropolis as in our own, post-Roe moment. Through readings of Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, and Ella Fitzgerald, alongside Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Sophie Treadwell, Henry shows how women turned the city’s presumed open and collective dimensions into a landscape of self-protection and possibility by imagining its resources as those of a stage. An essay drawn from this work appears in the journal MFS: Modern Fiction Studies.
Where the current project considers privacy in relation to women in the twentieth-century city, her next considers the complex nature of social activism in the present, turning specifically to the genre of the novel. Tentatively entitled “Making Generations: Black Feminist Fiction, Urban Sound, and the Challenge of Memory,” the book analyzes Black women’s acoustic experimentation as the underexamined basis of contemporary literature’s ongoing, politically inflected investment in modernism. It argues that sound fragments undergird forms of action in novels by Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Namwali Serpell, and Raven Leilani.
Professor Henry’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Feminist Modernist Studies, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and the Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms, as well as in edited volumes on such authors as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. She also guest-edited a special issue of the journal The Modernist Review. Before receiving her PhD in 2024, Henry worked as a journalist, publishing in such venues as Inc., Slate, and HuffPost. To read more about her work, visit www.zoelhenry.com.
