Humm, Maggie

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Humm, Maggie

PERSONAL:

Education: University of East Anglia, B.A. (with honors), 1966; King's College, University of London, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London, Docklands Campus, 4-6 University Way, London E16 2RD, England.

CAREER:

Educator, writer, and editor. North East London Polytechnic, London, England, from lecturer to senior lecturer, 1971-95; University of East London, London, professor and research leader, 1995—. Also distinguished visiting scholar and professor at universities, including Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1982; Stanford University, 1986; Rutgers University, 1998; and the University of Karachi; also visiting fellow at the University of London's School for Advanced Study, 2001.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Outstanding Academic Book of the Year, Choice, 1990, for The Dictionary of Feminist Theory.

WRITINGS:

Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1986.

An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Feminist Criticism, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1987.

The Dictionary of Feminist Theory, Harvester Wheatsheaf (New York, NY), 1989, 2nd edition, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 1995.

Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers, Manchester University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor and author of introduction) Feminisms: A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf (Hemel Hempstead, England), 1992.

(Editor and author of introduction) Modern Feminisms: Political, Literary, Cultural, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism, Harvester Wheatsheaf (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor) Practising Feminist Criticism: An Introduction, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf (New York, NY), 1995.

Feminism and Film, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1997.

Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2003.

Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2006.

Contributor of chapters to books, including Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by J. Berman and J. Goldman, Pace University Press (New York, NY), 2001; Feminism, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: Women and Culture in Early Twentieth Century British Literature, edited by M. Barbieto, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), 2001; Genero, feminismo y educacion superior: una vision internacional, edited by E.Z. Martelo, V.V. Garcia and P.A. Manzanares, Colegio de Postgraduados (Mexico City, Mexico), 2001; Literary Modernism and Photography, edited by P. Hansom, Greenwood Press (Westport CT), 2002; Fifty Years of English Studies in Spain, 1952-2002, edited by I.M. Palacios Martinez and others, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), 2003; and Woolf in the Real World, edited by K. Kukil, Clemson Digital Press, 2005. Contributor to periodicals, including Feminist Theory, Woolf Studies Annual, Virginia Woolf Bulletin, Signs, and Revista Canario de Estudios Ingleses. Also contributing editor to The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, Routledge (New York, NY), and advisory editor to "Gender and Society" series, Falmer Press, and "Gender and Higher Education" series and "Feminist Theory" series, Taylor and Francis. Books have been translated into foreign languages, including Arabic, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Ukrainian and Turkish.

SIDELIGHTS:

Maggie Humm is a professor of cultural studies and the author and editor of several books focusing on women, feminism, and noted author Virginia Woolf, often in relation to Woolf's interest in photography and film. For example, in her book Feminism and Film, Humm discusses topics such as pornography, feminist theories of mothering in film, and the relationship between feminist literary theory and feminist film. Writing in the NWSA Journal, Hazel Dicken-Garcia commented that the author "applies various feminist theories to film to focus on issues—racial, maternal, lesbian, and linguistic differences—that function ‘saliently on the visual level.’" The reviewer also called Feminism and Film "important to film scholars."

Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema explores Woolf's interest in photography and cinema and places Woolf's own photographs in context with feminist theory. The author also discusses Woolf and her photographs in relation to the photographs taken by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the cinematic writings of Woolf's contemporary female writers. Numerous photographs taken by Woolf and Bell are included. "This volume is full of myriad fascinating details, such as the fact that Vanessa and Virginia attended a film screening of a caesarian operation, and that photography was praised by women's magazines as an incentive to good health," wrote Jane Garrity in the Women's Review of Books. Garrity also noted: "Overall, Humm's book offers an engrossing and pleasurable overview of modernist women's engagement with the new technologies of photography and cinema." Other reviewers also praised the book, including Tammy Clewell, who wrote in College Literature that the author's "account of the way that Woolf and other women participated in early twentieth-century visual cultures offers nothing less than a challenge to reigning accounts of modernist aesthetics."

Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell is a companion volume to Modernist Women and Visual Cultures. It contains 200 photographs by Woolf, Bell, and other members Bloomsbury Group of artists and notables, as well as a detailed analysis of the photographs by Humm. The author is particularly interested in the photographs within the context of how they were collected and subsequently placed in albums by Woolf and Bell. Molly Youngkin, writing in English Literature in Transition, commented that the author "argues that both the practice of photography itself and the arrangement of photos in the albums illustrate the development of Virginia and Vanessa as ‘autobiographical artists,’ who were continually using their familial past as a way to respond to the cultural atmosphere of the early twentieth century." Despite Humm's academic interests in the photographs, Youngkin commented that the book was appropriate for both scholars and the general public, noting: "Humm's analysis enhances rather than detracts from the images in this volume and raises provocative issues about the influence of the photo album on better-known media such as literature and painting."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

College Literature, summer, 2005, Tammy Clewell, review of Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema, p. 172.

English Literature in Transition, fall, 2006, Molly Youngkin, review of Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, p. 475.

NWSA Journal, summer, 1998, Hazel Dicken-Garcia, review of Feminism and Film, p. 148.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2006, review of Snapshots of Bloomsbury.

Sunday Tribune (England), May 21, 2006, Alice Jones, review of Snapshots of Bloomsbury.

Times (London, England), March 15, 2006, review of Snapshots of Bloomsbury.

Women's Review of Books, September, 2003, Jane Garrity, review of Modernist Women and Visual Cultures, p. 20.