Profile: Catherine Hollis

Catherine Hollis, assistant professor of English, hopes to be in Dublin next June 16 for the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day immortalized in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

Hollis, who says that teaching the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf is her favorite part of her job, asserts that reading Ulysses can and should be a life-altering (or at least mind-altering) event and, as such, forms the cornerstone of her notion of a proper liberal arts education. “I’ve lived with these authors for so long,” she says, “that reading them feels like breathing and sharing them with my students like sitting down together at Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party (from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse).”

Hollis, who joined the Lawrence faculty in 2001, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in English and cinema studies from New York University and a doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to a new course titled Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, this year she also is teaching Contemporary British and Post-Colonial Fiction, Major British Writers, and Freshman Studies. She also teaches in the gender studies program.

Her current research focuses on the significant roles of several notable women in the publication of Ulysses and, more generally, on women active in the editing and publication of modernist literary texts. Hollis notes that Ulysses was published in 1922 by an American, Sylvia Beach of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company; it was largely funded by an English Quaker, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and first saw print in installments in a “little magazine” published by two women from Chicago, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. In line with those interests, this year Hollis organized a panel at the Modernist Studies Association Conference titled “Women Producing Modernism” and also presented a paper, “Virginia Woolf’s Double Signature,” at the Virginia Woolf Conference at Smith College.