Lily Sheehan’s research and teaching interests are in late-nineteenth and twentieth century American and British literatures, visual and material culture, fashion theory, periodical studies, affect studies, studies of race and ethnicity, and feminist theory. She is editing a book on fashion and literature for Cambridge University Press's Critical Concept Series and writing a monograph about how texts and textiles shape conceptions of peace during the twentieth century. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Her previous monograph, Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature (Cornell University Press 2018), 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. Sheehan 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. In addition, she has published essays on Black internationalism and beauty culture, fashion magazines and periodicity, avant-garde dress design, and writers including Virginia Woolf, Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois in Modern Fiction Studies, 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. 
• “Consumer Culture.” The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Fernald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 472-486. 
• “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, vol. 4, cycle 1, Mar. 2019. 
• “To Exist Serially: Black Radical Magazines and Beauty Culture, 1917-1919.” Special issue on Seriality, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, ed. Matthew Levay, vol. 9, no. 1, 2018, pp. 30-52.  
• “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, pp. 124-138. 
• “‘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, vol. 62, no. 3, 2016, pp. 412-443. 
• “Fashioning Internationalism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Writing.” In A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 137-153. 

Curriculum Vitae