Jessica Berman is Professor of English; Language, Literacy, and Culture; and Gender + Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she also directs the Dresher Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001) and Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (2011), and the editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf (2016). She also co-edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press. In 2016–17, she is President of the Modernist Studies Association.
Jessica Berman
Contributions
Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?
When Orlando falls into his transformative trance at the mid-point of Virginia Woolf’s romp of a novel, he is an agent of the British Empire in Constantinople, at the moment of receiving his newly conferred Dukedom. The ceremony is a pageant of Empire, which gathers “people of all nationalities” to celebrate Orlando’s status, while the text makes frequent reference to the show of British superiority in this event.