Faculty and Staff

Emma Heaney

Professor • Department of English

Professor Emma Heaney received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from The University of California, Irvine. Her first book is The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Remainder (Northwester UP, 2017). She is currently editing a collection of essays that address the relation of cisness to feminism. She has articles published or forthcoming on sexology, trans women in 1970s feminist politics, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Claude McKay, Elena Ferrante, and faculty efforts to support undocumented students and workers on college campuses.

Languages (other than English)

French  Italian  Spanish 

Degrees

PhD Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA

BA Comparative Literature, Smith College Northampton, MA

Specialization

Modernist Literature (British and American), LGBT Studies, Women's Literature, 19th and 20th Century European Literature, African-American Literature

Representative Publications


The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory ; Evanston, IL; Northwestern University Press; 2017


“They Were Right There Together: Black Abundance in Home to Harlem and Vernacular Indifference to Sexological Expertise”; Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism; Routledge;


“Daily Life Frequently Interrupted Like a Slap”: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels as Chronicles of 1970s Italian Feminism; Textual Practice; 2021


Sexual Difference without Cisness in Ulysses; Textual Practice; Volume Ulysses at 100: A Special Issue of Textual Practice, 2021


Supporting Undocumented Students and Workers on Campus: Lessons from a New Jersey experiment; Academic Labor beyond the College Classroom: Working for Our Values; Routledge; 2019

Representative Presentations


Feminism Against Cisness
University of Pennsylvania: Theorizing Lecture Series of the Program for Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, in collaboration with the Mods Working Group, and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (GSWS) Program.
Philadelphia , PA 2020


The Trans Allegory and International Studies, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London
School of Politics and International Relations
London, 2021


“Literature After Cisness”
Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality and the Initiative on Labor and Culture, Yale University
New Haven, CT 2022


The Ghost Cousins at Mid-Century
Department of English, Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr, PA 2022


The Materialist Disarticulation of Sexual Difference From Cisness
Seminar in the History of the Gendered Body, Oxford University
Oxford, 2022

Fellowships, Grants and Research

MacDowell Fellowship
Fellowship

Notable Courses Taught

Women in Literature, Nineteenth-Century Women's Voices, The Harlem Renaissance, Queer Literature, Twentieth-Century European Literature

352 Preakness Hall

By appointment