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Medd, Jodie

Professor

Research Interests

 Cross Appointments

Current Research

My research and teaching interests have coalesced around the inter-related fields of modernist studies, the history of sexuality, and feminist and queer studies, and have grown to engage with more contemporary writing and cultural concerns. My first monograph, Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2012), examines how the scandalous suggestion of lesbianism in legal, legislative, national, and artistic realms in England and the United States functioned to mediate a range of cultural and artistic anxieties during and after the Great War. At the same time, I consider how the suggestion of lesbianism evaded specific reference while constituting lesbianism as a crisis of interpretation. Developing from these interests, I edited The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2015), which focuses on literature in English in a range of historical, geographical, theoretical, and generic contexts.

I have also published archival-based research on modernist literary production and queer feeling, from friendship to patronage; analyses of contemporary queer fiction, particularly in relation to the modernist past; conceptualizations of queer modernism and temporality; and considerations of the queerness of parenting in relation to queer theory.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with form in my own academic writing. This shift in style and form connects with my teaching and interests in memoir and creative nonfiction, particularly in queer feminist decolonial contexts. While loosening my connection to modernist studies, I maintain attachments to authors in the field, including Viriginia Woolf, whose work continues to inform my thinking and writing. I have revived previous interests in queer gender and sexuality and censorship in the early-twentieth century to develop a course on sexuality, anti-gender ideology, censorship, book banning, and attacks on libraries in our current moment.

My teaching and supervision at both the undergraduate and graduate level includes courses and supervisions related to gender, sexuality, twentieth- and twenty-first-century (queer) writing, and queer theory/queer studies.

Honours and Awards

Books

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature.  Ed. Jodie Medd.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Forthcoming and Recent Publications

“The Queerness of Parenting: or (Almost) Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from Queer Theory.” Domesticity and Queer Theory, edited by Jess Shollenberger and Mary Wilson, Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming.

“Posthumous Queer Modernism.” Contemporary Queer Modernism, edited by Melanie Micir, Routledge, 2025, pp. 74-88. (open access)

“Loving/Hating/Loving Lesbian Modernism,” Interrogating Lesbian Modernism, edited by Elizabeth English, Jana Funke, and Sarah Parker, Edinburgh UP, 2023, pp. 31-55.

“Feeling Modernist Patronage: Edward Marsh, Rupert Brooke, and Modernism’s Intimate Ecologies.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 29, no. 4, 2022, pp. 785-816.

“The Well of Loneliness,” Global Encyclopedia of LGBTQ History, edited by Howard Chiang, et. al. Macmillan, 2019.

“‘I didn’t know there could be such writing’: The Aesthetic Intimacy of E.M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence,” Queer Bloomsbury, edited by Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt, University of Edinburgh Press, 2016, pp. 258-275.

“Queer Fiction in Contemporary Britain.” The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, Vol. IV: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, edited by Heesok Chang, Robert DeMaria, Jr., and Samantha Zacher, Blackwell, John Wiley and Sons, 2014, pp. 424-439.

“Encountering the Past in Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, edited by Hugh Stevens, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 167-184.

“‘Patterns of the Possible’: National Imaginings and Queer Historical (Meta)Fictions in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.” GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) vol 13, no 1 (2007), pp. 1-31, .

“‘Seances and Slander’: Radclyffe Hall in 1920.” Sapphic Modernities, edited by Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, Palgrave Press, 2006, pp. 201-216.

“The Cult of the Clitoris: Anatomy of a National Scandal.” Modernism/Modernity, vol 9, no.1, January 2002, 21-49. Reprinted in in Sexuality and Identity, edited by Leslie J. Moran. International Library of Essays in Law and Society Series. Ashgate Publishing, 2006, pp. 137-170.

Recent Presentations

“Bloomsbury’s Posthumous Queer Temporalities,” Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, Mount St. Joseph University, Cincinnati, OH.  June 5-9, 2019.

“Modernism’s Queer Temporal Resistance in the Space Between,” Intersections of Resistance in the Space Between (Annual Space Between Conference), University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO. June 7-9, 2018.

“The queer intimacy of T.E. Lawrence and E.M. Forster,” Queering the Bloomsbury Group Roundtable. Modernist Studies Association Conference. Pasadena, CA. November 2016.

Invited participant, Workshop on “Lesbian Studies in Queer Times.” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. April 2016.

“(Homo)national Capital and Affective Investments: The Queer Posthumous Production of Rupert Brooke.” Sexuality Studies Association Annual Conference, at the Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. Ottawa, ON. June 2015.

Invited participant, Radcliffe Institute Workshop on “Writing Lesbianism into History and Representation,” Harvard University, Boston, MA. January, 2014.

“Queer Modernist Historical (Be)longings.” Modernist Studies Association Conference.  University of Nevada, Las Vegas. October 2012.

“Edward Marsh: Affective Economies of Modernist Patronage.”  The Battle of the Brows, Cultural Distinctions in the Space Between, 1914-1945.  McGill University. Montreal, PQ. June 2011.

“Patronage and the Posthumous Production of Rupert Brooke.”  Modernist Studies Association Conference. Victoria, B.C. November 2010.

“Patronage and the Production of Rupert Brooke’s National Body.” Portsmouth Symposium on English Literature. Portsmouth University, UK. May 2007.

Recent Graduate Courses

ENGL 5610: Queer Historical Fiction and Temporal Re/Imaginings
ENGL 5608: Reading Virginia Woolf: Then and Now
ENGL 5002: Queer Reading
ENGL 5608: Queer Theory and the Production of Modernist Sexualities

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