Biography
JL Burstein works on fashion, modernism, and the avant-garde with historical expertise in British and European literature and visual art from the late 19th century through the contemporary moment. Graduate courses include “fashion and modernism,” the transhistorical novel, the middlebrow, and introductory surveys to modernism. Undergraduate courses range from large lecture introductions to the English major; to smaller seminars on boredom, wandering women, contemporary fiction, blood, privacy, and "Excellent Women"--the latter part of an ongoing interest in domestic fictions and under-read female British writers of the 1910s-1960s. Professor Burstein also teaches modern novel courses, some focusing on adultery, some on embodiment; and major-texts courses on Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. Having chaired dissertation committees on a variety of topics--the changing role of cartography in the Great War, the cultural role of impersonality, nonsense, music, the mistake, risk at high altitude, and crime and detection-- Professor Burstein is interested in working with students invested in historically grounded research, literature, and/or aesthetics.
Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art, Professor Burstein's first book, is widely interdisciplinary, engaging writers Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, and Henry James; visual artists Balthasar Klossowski de Rola and Hans Bellmer; and couturier Coco Chanel. As the author of the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture's "Visual Arts" chapter, Burstein is a member of the editorial committee of the scholarly journal Modernism/modernity, and is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Literature. Burstein has also directed the UW English Department's London Study Abroad Program since 2017, and recurrently looks forward (sic) to showing students where exactly Virginia Woolf lived.
Research
Selected Research
- Jessica Burstein, "Salinger: The New One," Raritan (Winter 2019).
- Jessica Burstein, "All Politics," The 2019 Pushcart Anthology: Best of Small Presses.
- Jessica Burstein, review of Style and the Single Girl: How Modern Women Re-Dressed The Novel (2016), by Hope Howell Hodgkins, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 36:2 (Fall 2017).
- Jessica Burstein, "Claire Messud's Noble Lie" (2017) http://www.publicbooks.org/claire-messuds-noble-lie/
- Jessica Burstein, "The Quotation in Question," January 2017, http://new-theory.net/
- Jessica Burstein, “Visual Art,” The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture, ed. Celia Marshik (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 145-65.
- Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (Penn State University Press, 2012)
Research Advised
- Ebrahimzadeh, Navid. The Lowly Remains: Waste in Twentieth-Century American Fiction. 2020. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Daniel, Krista. Sophistication and Speech in British Middlebrow Fiction, 1929-1952. 2020. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Barwise, Claire. It Girls and Old Maids: Satiric Wit and the Single Woman in the Anglo-American Novel (1918-1958). 2020. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Arvidson, Heather. Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics. 2014. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Jennings, Chelsea. The Book as Object and Concept in American Poetry after Modernism. 2014. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Terry, Sarah N. Modernist Literary and Musical Collaboration. 2011. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Levay, Matthew Taylor. Modernism's Crimes: Violence, Degeneracy, and Detection. 2009. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Emmerson, Colbey Lani. Careless of Correctness: Modernism and the Mistake from Henry James to the Harlem Renaissance. 2003. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.