On November 7, Anne Fernald, a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University, will give a talk on "Change and Choice: Eight Modern Women."

In the early twentieth century, middle class women’s lives were defined by constraint. Yet from the late-nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, social and legal changes also opened a broad array of choices for women. This lecture will explore women’s lives a hundred years ago, the dramatic changes in their world, and the hard choices that women of the time faced. Anne Fernald will discuss these changes and choices through the stories of several women writers: the American children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown, Chinese-American writer Eileen Chang, Jamaican broadcaster and poet Una Marson, British pacifist Vera Brittain, film director Dorothy Arzner, and American editor and novelist Jessie Fauset, who discovered and championed many of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Fernald’s subjects used art to tell stories that bristle with the possibilities and dangers of women negotiating a life path more adventurous, interesting, and varied than predicted. These writers were wanderers, rebels, ladies, or pioneers; each was talented, but none so talented that she did not care what others thought or did not feel the sting of choosing to go against the grain of expectations. Virginia Woolf’s words form a common thread; her reflections on the challenges of women’s lives bring these stories together.

The lecture is free and open to the public and is held on the UT Knoxville campus. Public parking is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage for our off-campus visitors. Everyone is welcome!

About the speaker:
Anne E. Fernald is a professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Fordham University. She is the editor of the Cambridge University Press Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and the Norton Critical Edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2021). She is co-editor of Modernism/modernity and one of the editors of The Norton Reader, a widely-used anthology of essays. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006) as well as articles and reviews on Woolf and feminist modernism.
Professor Fernald was invited by Urmila Seshagiri, associate professor of English at UT.

About the Series:
The UT Humanities Center's Distinguished Lecture Series bring acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus for research-based conversations with UT faculty and graduate students and to give a public talk on a topic of the speaker's choosing. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our nine affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to receive a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the humanities today. Details on this season’s program are available at humanitiescenter.utk.edu/public/visiting. If you enjoy this series and would like to support future UT Humanities Center programming, please visit humanitiescenter.utk.edu/giving to learn about giving opportunities.