Louise Hornby

Louise Hornby received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She works primarily on British modernism and the relationship between literature and visual technology in the first part of the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in comparative literary modernism; the histories and theories of photography; film studies; interdisciplinary studies; art history and visual culture; and critical theory. In her current book project, Photographic Modernism: The Pursuit of Objectivity, she investigates the ways in which literary modernism was underwritten by the desire for objective forms of visual knowledge, which find their realization in photographic images. Photography operates as an expression of objectivity precisely at a time when modernist literature sought to reclaim the territory of realism by way of images and in epistemological terms that were commensurate to the impersonality and multi-perspectivalism of modern science. By suggesting that modernist objectivity and epistemology are shaped by photographic models, the book upsets a teleological approach to literature and visual technology, which would place cinema at the center of modernism’s scopic regime, and stakes a claim for the persistent and independent role of still photography in literary and visual modernism even after the invention of the motion picture. Her article, “The Cameraless Optic: Anna Atkins and Virginia Woolf” appeared in English Language Notes’ issue on photography and literature; and “Visual Clockwork: Photographic Time and the Instant in ‘Proteus,’” was included in a special section of the James Joyce Quarterly on Joyce and cinema. She has pursued archival work at the George Eastman House, the J. Paul Getty Museum, The New York Public Library, the Pacific Film Archive, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Drawing from the fields of literature, art history, and film, she works in both her research and her teaching to cultivate an interdisciplinary ground, while also paying close attention to critical canonical and generic distinctions between media.