Dr. Elizabeth Outka

Associate Professor of English
303-G Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 287-1806
Fax: (804) 289-8313

Research:
Professor Outka’s research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and culture. Her new book, Consuming Traditions, is on the marketing of authenticity in turn-of-the-century Britain. The book explores how the selling of objects and places allegedly free of commercial taint marks a crucial turn in modern culture and offers a new way to understand literary modernism and its complex negotiation of tradition and novelty. She investigates works by a wide range of writers, including Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

She is working on a second book project, Haunted Modernities, about trauma and WWI.

Teaching:
The Modern Novel
Twentieth-Century British Literature
Modernism
Literature of World War I
Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield

Education:
Ph.D. in English, University of Virginia
B.A., Yale University

Selected Publications:
Consuming Traditions:  Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford University Press, 2009.  

“Crossing the Great Divides:  Selfridges, Modernity, and the Commodified Authentic.”  MODERNISM/modernity.  12: 2 (2005): 311-328. 

“Buying Time:  Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia.”  NOVEL:  A Forum on Fiction. 36.3 (2003): 330-350.    

“The Shop Windows Were Full of Sparkling Chains:  Consumer Desire and Woolf’s Night and Day."  Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds, Pace University Press, 2001. 

Awards:

Community-Based Learning Faculty Fellowship, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, University of Richmond, 2009.

The James D. Kennedy, III Endowed Faculty Fellowship, University of the South, 2006-2008.

John B. Stephenson Fellowship, Appalachian College Association, 2004.

Academic Initiative Grant, University of the South, 2004.

William B. Christian Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2000.

All-University Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in Arts and Humanities, University of Virginia, 1998.

Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, English Department, University of Virginia, 1997-1998.