Jodie Medd

Research Interests

• Literary Modernism
• Sexuality Studies (Queer Theory, Queer Studies)
• Gender and Feminist Studies
• Queer Literature
• Contemplative Pedagogy & Healing-Centered Education

Cross Appointments

• The Feminist Institute of Social Transformation
• Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture

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. 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.

My curiosity about the social, erotic, affective, and economic relations that underpin modernism led to an archival research project on modernist literary production and queer feeling. My work in this area includes an essay on the aesthetic intimacy between E. M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence in Queer Bloomsbury (ed. Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt, Edinburgh UP 2016) and an article on queer feeling and modernist patronage, focused on the patron Edward Marsh and the poet Rupert Brooke (Modernism/Modernity, forthcoming 2022).

I also work on contemporary queer fiction, particularly that which (re)writes the modernist past. In this area I have published on Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys, and contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, and The Blackwell Companion to British Literature. These interests have inspired recent graduate courses on Queer Historical Fiction.

Combining my interests in modernist queer feeling and temporality, I am contributing a chapter on “Posthumous Queer Modernism” to the Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism (ed. Melanie Micir, Routledge, forthcoming 2022). Recently, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with form in an essay called “Loving/Hating/Loving Lesbian Modernism” for Interrogating Lesbian Modernism (ed. Elizabeth English, Jana Funke, and Sarah Parker, Edinburgh UP, forthcoming 2022).

Current research and writing interests include a project on “The Queerness of Parenting” and an essay on “Virginia Woolf and Contemplative Pedagogy,” connected to my larger interests in contemplative pedagogy and healing-centred education. I also have an ongoing interest in memoir and creative nonfiction, particularly memoirs of loss, parenthood/parent-child relations, and/or queer relationality.

My teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level includes courses on gender, sexuality, modernism, twentieth- and twenty-first-century (queer) literature, and queer theory/queer studies. I welcome inquiries about potential supervision from students working in literary modernist studies and/or queer and feminist studies.

Honours and Awards

• FASS Research Excellence Award (2019)
• “Favourite Faculty Member” (Residence) (2019)
• Nominee, Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award (2017, 2019)
• FASS Teaching Award (2009)
• Nominee, Carleton Employee Recognition Award (2008)
• Canada Council for the Arts, Author Residency Program (to host Ivan Coyote as Writer-in-Residence) (2007-08)
• Carleton University Teaching Achievement Award (2005)
• SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2003-07)

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

“Loving/Hating/Loving Lesbian Modernism,” Interrogating Lesbian Modernism, Eds. Elizabeth English, Jana Funke, and Sarah Parker, Edinburgh UP, Forthcoming 2022.

“Feeling Modernist Patronage: Edward Marsh, Rupert Brooke, and Modernism’s Intimate Ecologies,” Modernism/Modernity, Forthcoming 2022.

“Posthumous Queer Modernism,” The Routledge Companion to Modernism and Queer Theory. Ed. Melanie Micir. Routledge, Forthcoming 2022.

“The Well of Loneliness,” Global Encyclopedia of LGBTQ History. Eds. 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. Eds. Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt. University of Edinburgh Press, 2016. 258-275.

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

“Encountering the Past in Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing. Ed. Hugh Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

“‘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) 13.1 (2007): 1-31.

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

“The Cult of the Clitoris: Anatomy of a National Scandal.” Modernism/Modernity 9.1 (January 2002): 21-49.  Reprinted in in Sexuality and Identity. Ed. Leslie J. Moran.  International Library of Essays in Law and Society Series.  Ashgate Publishing, 2006. 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