Zoë Henry is a New York City-based writer and literary critic.
She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she researches African American literature, global modernism, gender and sexuality, feminist theory, and dance and performance. Her first book, The Public Interior: Modernism, Theatricality, and Interracial Aesthetics, explores how women across a mixed-race modernist archive used the resources of the city to remain “private in public,” thus desegregating the historiography of modernist literature. It develops a notion of privacy that moves beyond the domestic to intertwine with law, eros, and the psyche, arguing that privacy’s denial to Black and mixed-race women can be understood as an afterlife of slavery, unfolding in the twentieth-century metropolis as in our own, post-Roe moment. Her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Feminist Modernist Studies, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and the Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms, as well as in several edited volumes on such authors as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
Before arriving at Columbia, Henry taught courses on short fiction and African-American literature, culture, and performance in the Department of English at Indiana University, where she received her PhD in 2024. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Brown University.