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Pamela L. Caughie

Professor Emerita

As a modernist scholar and a feminist and gender theorist, my research has focused on feminist and poststructuralist theoretical interventions in the study of modernist and postmodernist literature and culture, and on “identity issues,” especially gender, sexuality, race, and class. I regularly teach courses on modernism, postmodernism, feminism, and gender and transgender studies. Graduate seminars offered in the past six years include “Queer Modernity,” “Feminist Theory,” “Postmodernism,” and “Virginia Woolf and Transnational Modernism,” the latter designed around the theme of the 2014 International Virginia Woolf Conference,” which I co-hosted at Loyola. Recent undergraduate courses have featured “The Feminist Avant-Garde,” “Trans* Narratives,” “Contemporary Theory,” and “African American Literature.” I am also a former president of the Modernist Studies Association, former director of the English graduate program, and former director of the Women’s Studies and Gender Studies Program.

Over the past decade I have become increasingly involved in digital humanities. I am currently on the advisory board of our Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, where I also serve on the Graduate Committee. I am a founding- and co-director of Modernist Networks, a consortium of digital projects in modernist literature and culture, and a co-editor of Woolf Online, a digital archive of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. Presently I am project director for the Lili Elbe Digital Archive, a digital edition and archive of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, one of the first persons to undergo gender confirmation surgery in 1930.

Along with directing this digital project, I am co-editor, with Sabine Meyer, a transgender scholar from Berlin, of Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, to be published in Bloomsbury Academic’s Modernist Archives series (January 2020). I have edited or co-edited three other books, and have published two monographs and over forty book chapters and articles on modernism, Woolf, technology, and theory.

I love what I do, and I am aware every day of my life how privileged I am to be able to say that. Hours spent discussing theory with students in office hours and at local coffee shops, or editing a student’s writing, are, for me, not hours lost from my own work, but pleasure gained from an exchange of ideas with others whose interests and passions become my own. This is why I love digital humanities collaborative work. I feel fortunate every day that I am able to do what I love to do, and that enjoyment in my work is what I hope to pass onto my students. I see my primary role as a Loyola faculty member as modeling the passion for ideas and the generosity of spirit that enables liberal education to work. 

Recent Invited Lectures

“Jane Austen is Woke,” Keynote lecture for the Chicago Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, December 7, 2024

“Art Talk: Creating Lili Elbe,” Shin Gallery, New York, October 12, 2022

“On the Ethics of Passing, Still and Again,” Keynote Address, International Conference on “The Dynamics of Postcolonial Passings,” University of Liège, Belgium, May 12, 2022

“The End(s) of Feminist Pedagogy,” Brunel University, London, March 4, 2020

“Creating the Lili Elbe Digital Archive,” University of Copenhagen, March 2, 2020

Education

  • BA, English and Mathematics, James Madison University
  • MA, English, James Madison University
  • PhD, Modern Literature and Culture, University of Virginia

Pamela Caughie CV

Program Areas

  • Transatlantic Literature and Culture
  • Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture
  • African American Literature
  • Literature and Identity
  • Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
  • Women’s Studies and Gender Studies
  • Literary Theory
  • Modern and Postmodern Literature and Culture
  • Gender and Transgender Studies
  • Feminist Theory
  • Literary Theory
  • Literature and Identity
  • Pedagogy

Research Interests

  • Modern and Postmodern Literature and Culture
  • Gender and Transgender Studies
  • Feminist Theory
  • Literary Theory
  • Literature and Identity
  • Pedagogy

Publications/Research Listings

Selected works of Dr. Caughie's can be accessed digitally through the University Library.

Books:

  • Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, co-editor with Sabine Meyer. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
  • Virginia Woolf Writing the World, co-editor with Diana L. Swanson. Clemson UP, 2015.
  • Disciplining Modernism, edited and introduced. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009.
  • Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited. Garland Publishing, 2000.
  • Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility. U of Illinois Press, 1999.
  • Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. U of Illinois Press, 1991.

Recent Articles and Book Chapters:

  • “Bloomsbury’s Gender Politics,” in A History of the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Derek Ryan (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2025)
  • “My Life with Lili,” TSQ*Now, posted 17 July 2024
  • “Transgressing Translation/Translating Transgression: The Lili Elbe Digital Archive and the Modalities of Translation,” Translation and Literature 32.3 (November 2023)
  • "The Word that Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Journal of Controversial Ideas, v. 3 (October 2023)
  • “Teaching with Woolf Online.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany (Fall 2021)
  • “Celebrating the Launch of the Lili Elbe Digital Archive: A Transfeminist Symposium,” with Emily Datskou. Transgender Studies Quarterly 7: 3 (Fall 2020): 463-475.
  • “’Between Nations, Between Genders’: Transgender and the Experience of Exile.” Vorstufen des Exils / Early Stages of Exile, edited by Reinhard Andress (Brill, 2020), 109-121.
  • “Storm Clouds on the Horizon: Feminist Ontologies and the Problem of Gender,” with Emily Datskou and Rebecca Parker, Feminist Modernist Studies 1.3 (October 2018), 230-242.
  • "The Modernist Novel in its Contemporaneity," A History of the Modernist Novel. Edited by Gregory Castle. Cambridge UP, 2015. 
  • “The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man into Woman.” Modern Fiction Studies (Fall 2013), 501-525.
  •  “’The best people’: The Making of the Black Bourgeoisie in Writings of the Negro Renaissance.” Modernism/Modernity (Fall 2013), 519-538.
  • "Virginia Woolf:  Radio, Gramophone, and Broadcasting," in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf. Edited by Maggie Humm, Edinburgh UP, April 2010.
  • "Time's Exception," Modernism and Theory. Edited by Stephen Ross. Routledge, 2008.
  • "Poststructuralist and Postmodernist Approaches to Virginia Woolf," in Palgrave Advances in Virgina Woolf Studies. Edited by Anna Snaith. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007.
  • ""Modernism, Gender and Passing." Edited and introduced, in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies; Complex Intersections. General Editor Bonnie Kime Scott. U of Illinois P, 2006. 

Awards

  • Peter Hans Kolvenbach Award for Engaged Teaching, Loyola University Chicago, 2018
  • Faculty Member of the Year, Loyola University Chicago, 2012
  • Graduate Faculty Member of the Year, Loyola University Chicago, 2009