NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Urmila Seshagiri
This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.
Urmila Seshagiri is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee and specializes in modernism, 20th and 21st-century transnational fiction, and women’s writing. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press) and the editor of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press). A recipient of grants from the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, she is preparing the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s unfinished memoir, Sketch of the Past, and is writing a book about the complex role of modernism in contemporary fiction.
When did you first get your idea for your research project?
A few years ago, I was writing an article on experimental modernist narratives and I needed to check a reference in Woolf’s memoir, Sketch of the Past, an enormously important work that was unfinished and unpublished when Woolf died in 1941. I only had my battered grad school copy at hand—a trade paperback with just a few explanatory notes—so I went to the university library to check out a scholarly edition. And guess what? There wasn’t one. I was stunned to discover that Sketch hasn’t been reissued since 1985, and that there isn’t an edition with a detailed scholarly apparatus. So I decided to create the edition that I was looking for, something that would help readers and researchers studying Woolf’s only autobiography.
It’s been a transformative project. As I work with Woolf’s notes, manuscripts, and typescripts for her memoir—this work of art that Woolf herself never saw to completion—I’m awed by the responsibility of producing an accurate transcription, of editing, annotating, and introducing one of the most influential pieces Woolf ever wrote.
What research tools could you not live without?
Libraries and librarians! Archivists in NYPL's rare book collections are exceptional beings, as are the specialists in the Maps Division. And I am also very passionate about the OED Online, where I can happily lose myself for long periods of time.
What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?
The Berg's collection of Woolf’s papers includes a handwritten section of Sketch of the Past, and what was unexpected was being able to map, word by word, her composition and revision process in some of the memoir’s most lyrical passages. Woolf’s materials for Sketch are scattered across collections in the British Library, the University of Sussex, and the NYPL, and it was exhilarating to see this section of the memoir and to understand its place in her process.
After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?
I held my NYPL Fellowship in early December, and every day when the Fellows’ reading room closed, I stepped outside into the magic of New York during the holiday season. It was so energizing to walk through the Bryant Park Winter Market as I headed back to my digs in East Harlem. I spent hours in Strand Books and saw the Afrofuturism Room at The Met. And I had the sublime experience of seeing Yannick Nézét-Séguin conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in Beethoven’s 2nd and 3rd Symphonies at Carnegie Hall.
Is there anything you’d like to tell someone looking to get started?
Archival research is addictive. It’s like being in a labyrinth and wondering if there is a pattern, a logic, to all the material you’re studying. Sometimes what you find confirms your thinking; in other moments, you have to move in entirely unexpected directions. I think that many scholars are intimidated by plunging into NYPL's collections, but I would tell them that the curators are experts in helping researchers navigate primary materials. The NYPL is the most wonderful library I have ever worked in: it is truly a public space and it is also a rarefied environment for literary scholars.