Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP 2017) traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Her edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness [Duke UP 2023], gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience. Her current research derives a theory of the transformation of queer and trans identities from works of literature spanning the long twentieth century. Emma was previously an Assistant Professor of English at William Patterson University and has held fellowships at MacDowell and the Marble House Project.
Emma Heaney
Clinical Assistant Professor
B.A. in Comparative Literature, Smith College
PhD in Comparative Literature, The University of California, Irvine
Comparative literature of the long twentieth century; feminist studies; trans studies; Marxist studies; creative writing
MacDowell Fellowship
Marble House Project Fellowship
James Harvey Dissertation Fellowship in LGBT Studies
Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship, Yale University
Renée Hubert Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Women’s Studies, University of California, Irvine
BOOKS
The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern University Press, 2017)
*reviewed in: Lambda Literary Review, Choice Reviews: The American Library Association, Women: A Cultural Review, The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and James Joyce Quarterly
Ghost Cousins: Literature After Cisness [in progress]
EDITED COLLECTION
Feminism Against Cisness [Duke University Press, 2023]
CHAPTERS IN EDITED COLLECTIONS
“Introduction: Sexual Difference Without Cisness” in Feminism Against Cisness [Duke University Press, 2023]
“1970s Transfeminism as Decolonial Praxis” (co-written with Margaux L. Kristjansson) in Feminism Against Cisness [Duke University Press, 2023]
“Modernism and the Social Structures of Sexual Violence” in #MeToo and Modernism [solicited, Clemson University Press, Fall 2022]
“History Touches Us Everywhere: American Queer and Trans Memoir in the Long Twentieth Century” in The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature [solicited, Cambridge University Press, 2023]
“Tiresias and TERFism: The Waste Land’s Modernist Feminine, Cis and Trans” in Eliot Now [solicited, Bloomsbury, 2023]
“They Were Right There Together: Black Abundance in Home to Harlem and Vernacular Indifference to Sexological Expertise” in The Routledge Companion to Modernism and Queer Theory [solicited, Routledge, 2023]
“Supporting Undocumented Students and Workers on Campus: Lessons from A New Jersey Experiment” (Co-authored with Fanny Lauby) in Working for Our Values: Academic Labor Outside the College Classroom (Routledge, December 2019)
“Binders are Burning: Documentary Film, Personal Narrative, and Trans History” in American Visual Memoirs After the 1970s (The University of Bucharest Press, 2010)
REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Flaunt/Stare: Seeing Trans Femininity in Literary Modernism” (Visualities Forum, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, June 2022)
“Sexual Difference without Cisness in Ulysses” (solicited, “Ulysses at 100,” Textual Practice, January 2022)
“Daily Life Frequently Erupted Like a Slap: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels as Narrative Intertexts of 1970s Italian Feminist Praxis” (Textual Practice, March 2021)
“I Am Not a Friend to Men: Embodiment and Desire in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Transvestites Case Studies” (solicited, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, August 2017)
“Women-Identified Women: Women of Trans Experience in 1970s Lesbian Feminist Organizing” (Transgender Studies Quarterly, May 2016)
“The New Woman: Sexology, Literary Modernism, and the Trans Feminine Remainder” (Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, May 2015)
PUBLIC HUMANITIES WRITING AND APPEARANCES
“The Party Line” (The Tampa Review, September 2021)
“The Concept of Sexual Difference” (High Theory Podcast with Kim Adams and Saronik Basu, June 2021)
“The Lavender Menace” (Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project Podcast, June 2021)
“Is the Cervix Cis?: My Year in the Stirrups” (Asterix Journal, February 2021)
Writing the New Woman: Modernist Literature on Trans Femininity
Interdisciplinarity
Genre Fiction from the Perspective of Craft
Literature After Cisness