- Ph.D., Tufts University
- M.A., McGill University
Judith C. Brown
Associate Professor, English
Director of Undergraduate Studies
- jcb@iu.edu
- Ballantine Hall 458
- Office Hours
Education
About Judith C. Brown
Judith Brown works on transatlantic and global modernisms and has interests in aesthetic theory, visual culture, and interdisciplinary studies.
Her book, Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2024), claims that passive resistance--a phrase first promoted and then soundly rejected by Gandhi--most aptly describes an aesthetic rather than political principle, and one aligned with modernism. Rabindranath Tagore, RK Narayan, Ahmed Ali, GV Desani, Virginia Woolf, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Le Corbusier linger over the uneasy pairing of passivity and resistance, finding alternative means of survival, new languages of reflection, and unexpected avenues of resistance enabled by art in the late colonial era.
Brown’s first book, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Cornell University Press, 2009) looks to the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the twentieth century, arguing that glamour becomes a defining aesthetic of modernism. Combining the inhuman, the cold and the deathly, glamour replaces the aura lost in a modernizing world and links cigarettes, Chanel No. 5 and cellophane to literary modernism by Stevens, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Larsen, and Stein.
She is currently at work on Painting Lessons, a book that explores the entanglements of grief, painting, and literature.
Journal Articles and Other Publications
“Tagore’s Wardrobe,” co-written with Anushka Sen, forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Fashion and Literature.
“Ahmed Ali and the Art of Languishing,” ELH (2018).
“‘This globe, full of figures’: Virginia Woolf’s Comprehensive Economy,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature (2016).
“Questions for R.K. Narayan,” PMLA (2016).
“Style,” in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Rebecca Walkowitz and Eric Hayot (Columbia UP, 2016).
“Glamour’s Silhouette: Fashion, Fashun, and Modernism,” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Blackwell, 2013).
“Pretty Richard,” in Shakesqueer: The Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Duke UP, 2011).
“Garbo’s Glamour,” in Modernist Star Maps, ed. Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldberg (Ashgate Press, 2010).
“Geographies of Gender and Modernism,” review essay in The Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2010).
“Cellophane Glamour,” Modernism/Modernity (2008).
“Borderline, Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression,” Modernism/Modernity (2007).
“A Certain Laughter: Sherwood Anderson’s Experiment in Form,” Modernist Cultures (2007).
The College of Arts