Dr. Elizabeth Outka awarded NEH Fellowship
December 14, 2015
Dr. Elizabeth Outka, Associate Professor of English, has been awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Outka’s book project, Raising the Dead: War, Plague, Magic, Modernism, is an exploration of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which killed as many as 100 million people, occurred in the shadow of the devastation of WWI, and yet appears infrequently in British and American literature. In the wake of the flu, people from all interests and professions became obsessed with the possibility of contact with the dead and the resurrection of the spiritual – and material – body. This disease and obsession appear in a few modernist texts of interwar culture that Dr. Outka will examine in depth, including works by authors including Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and others – some of whom suffered personally during the outbreak. With NEH support for her ongoing work, Dr. Outka anticipates that her book will be ready for publication in 2018, in time to commemorate the centennial of the beginning of the pandemic.
Dr. Outka has taught at the University of Richmond since 2008, after teaching for seven years and achieving tenure at Sewanee, the University of the South. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia, and her B.A. from Yale. Her first book, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009 and again in paperback in 2012, plus she has published articles in a number of the leading journals in her field.
Dr. Outka’s book project, Raising the Dead: War, Plague, Magic, Modernism, is an exploration of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which killed as many as 100 million people, occurred in the shadow of the devastation of WWI, and yet appears infrequently in British and American literature. In the wake of the flu, people from all interests and professions became obsessed with the possibility of contact with the dead and the resurrection of the spiritual – and material – body. This disease and obsession appear in a few modernist texts of interwar culture that Dr. Outka will examine in depth, including works by authors including Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and others – some of whom suffered personally during the outbreak. With NEH support for her ongoing work, Dr. Outka anticipates that her book will be ready for publication in 2018, in time to commemorate the centennial of the beginning of the pandemic.
Dr. Outka has taught at the University of Richmond since 2008, after teaching for seven years and achieving tenure at Sewanee, the University of the South. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia, and her B.A. from Yale. Her first book, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009 and again in paperback in 2012, plus she has published articles in a number of the leading journals in her field.