Zoë Henry is a Bloomington-based writer and literary critic. Her first book, The Public Interior: Modernism, Theatricality, and Interracial Aesthetics, desegregates the landscape of modernist studies by reevaluating narrative form in texts by interracial women writers. It argues that women negotiated visibility in the twentieth-century city by using its resources as a metaphorical stage play to remain “private in public.” From the fin de siècle to the incipient Civil Rights Movement, the novels, poems, and performances surveyed reflect the emergence of women in public space, where new forms of waged labor and increasing sexual freedoms came coupled with risks. Women thus turned the city’s presumed open and collective dimensions into a private landscape in the service of liberation.
Other academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, Feminist Modernist Studies, The Modernist Review, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and the edited collections Teaching James Joyce in the 21st Century and The Routledge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Her journalism has appeared in Slate, HuffPost, Business Insider, and Inc. magazine, among other national publications. She is currently a PhD candidate (ABD) in English Literature at Indiana University, where she received her MA in 2020. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Brown University.
Photos by Ellise Verheyen.