Lily Sheehan’s research and teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literatures, feminist theory, studies in race and ethnicity, affect studies, visual and material culture, fashion studies, and periodical studies. She is writing a monograph about how anticolonial writers and designers addressed the fabrication of peace—that is, peace’s status a fiction but also a material practice—during the Cold War and its aftermath. Her other current projects include an essay on the phenomenon of the “whisper network” as a strategy of addressing gender and race-based harassment. She is co-editor with Matthew Levay of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Sheehan is the author of Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature (Cornell University Press 2018). The book argues that fashion describes the limits and possibilities for modernist aesthetic and political transformation, which continue to shape accounts of the uses of literature and literary criticism. She edited a book on Fashion and Literature (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), which features eighteen essays by emerging and leading scholars examining “fashion” as a key concept in literary studies that cuts across historical, linguistic, and generic sub-fields. She co-edited Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (University of New Hampshire Press 2011), an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores how fashion shaped ideas and experiences of femininity in Europe and North America from 1850 to 1940, as a well as a special issue on literary studies for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In addition, she has published essays on such topics as fashion design and the Nobel Peace prize, Black internationalism and beauty culture, fashion magazines and periodicity, and the Bloomsbury group and avant-garde design in Modern Fiction Studies, ASAP/J, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus+, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies,and a number of edited collections. 

Selected Publications

• Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018.
• Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, co-editor with Ilya Parkins. Becoming Modern/Reading Dress Series. Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011.
• Special Issue on Literary Studies, co-editor with Nancy Unger. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 23, no. 1 (2024).
• “Making Peace Sensational: Designs for the Nobel Prizes,” in Fashion and Feeling, eds. Roberto Filipello and Ilya Parkins. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
• “Consumer Culture” in The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Fernald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
• “Character, Archive, Method: A Conversation about Raven Leilani’s Luster,” co-author with Megan Ward. Forum on The Character of Literary Criticism, ASAP/J, ed. Octavio González and Lisa Mendelman, Sept. 2021.
• “Strong and Weak Repetitions.” Invited response to special Issue on Weak Theory, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 4, cycle 1 (March 2019).
• “To Exist Serially: Black Radical Magazines and Beauty Culture, 1917-1919.” Special issue on Seriality, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, ed. Matthew Levay, 9, no. 1 (2018).
• “Now and Forever? Fashion Magazines and the Temporality of the Interwar Period.” In Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939, eds. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, and Fiona Hackney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
• “‘This Great Work of the Creation of Beauty’: Imagining Internationalism in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Black Beauty Culture.” Modern Fiction Studies 62, no. 3, 2016.
• “Fashioning Internationalism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Writing,” in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Curriculum Vitae