About

Celia Marshik is a Professor at Stony Brook University who serves as the Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and the Dean of the Graduate School. Her academic interests include modernism and cultural studies, literature and law, and British modernism. Her work focuses on exploring the intersections of literature with legal and cultural frameworks, contributing to the understanding of modernist literature and its broader cultural implications.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Visual arts
• Computer Science
• Law
• History
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Art
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Archaeology
• Art history
• Linguistics
• Gender studies
• Literature

Selected publications

• Gender and modernism

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-01-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This entry traces the ways in which gender and sexuality were located at the heart of modernism’s encounter with the law. Beginning with examples of how transgressive female characters led to the censorship of modernist fiction, I go on to note that censorship had a dual effect: encouraging some writers to ever more obscenity while convincing others that some sexualities were too transgressive to publish. The entry then explores the relationship between censorship and copyright and the role of gender in relationship to libel and slander. I conclude with a brief look at legal contexts recently brought to bear on modernism and how critical approaches such as media studies reveal that modernism itself policed gender through obscenity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Future Is Female

  ADE Bulletin · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Censorship

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines how and when British government officials considered the nation’s reputation and international standing in decisions about whether to censor literature or theatrical performances. In the early twentieth century, officials in the Home and Lord Chamberlain’s Offices, among others, were eager to appear rational to their Parisian counterparts in the hope that French officials would increase efforts to suppress obscene publications. Simultaneously, British administrators expressed disapproval of American censors, whom they viewed as unduly prudish. As the century wore on, the Americans would outpace British censors in their toleration of obscene materials, and an increasing number of British citizens came to view their government’s response to texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover as benighted and paternalistic. The chapter argues that British censorship was not a strictly national activity but rather took place within the larger framework of international relations and a pursuit of global prestige.

  PublisherDOI

• Fashion’s Borders

  English Language Notes · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract The introduction traces the long history of fashion’s movement across cultural, national, and political borders. After brief case studies of early twentieth-century French and Spanish styles imagining fashion as an engine of transnational amity, the introduction highlights how fashion navigates some of the most troubled borders of recent years, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and racial violence. Fashion forces viewers and consumers to choose sides, whether through national identification or through recognition of the long history of black and brown bodies producing fashionable objects. To advance the global history of fashion, the introduction briefly discusses the work of designers Rawan Maki (Bahrain), Laurence Leenaert (Belgium), and Kim Jones (Great Britain), examining how each upends gender, race, class, or fashion binaries, and analyzes how LVMH and Uniqlo, brands at opposite ends of the contemporary style spectrum, underline the very different ways in which fashion traverses the globe in the twenty-first century. The introduction concludes with the hope that this issue will raise questions about fashion’s articulation of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as about the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sexual violence as founding narrative: Edna Gertrude Beasley’s <i>My First Thirty Years</i>

  Feminist Modernist Studies · 2021-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay argues that Gertrude Beasley's little-known memoir My First Thirty Years (Contact Editions, 1925) makes important contributions to the history of sexuality. Beasley's focus on sexual violence and its relationship with sexual development shifts our attention from object choice, the field's center of gravity, to the role of violence in individual and national sexual history. Moreover, I argue that Beasley both employs and argues with the work of published male sexologists, thus offering a type of vernacular sexology. Although Beasley's memoir was widely suppressed and remains out of print, this essay repositions her as an important voice on American sexuality around the turn of the twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

• “Have You any Tudor Underwear?” <i>Punch</i> on the Perils of Historically Accurate Fancy Dress

  The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Art
  • Visual arts

  ABSTRACT The British humor magazine Punch skewered many fashions during its long history, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, fancy dress costumes were a repeated target of its satire. The magazine particularly deflated attempts at historical accuracy in fancy dress even though some contemporaries, like Virginia Woolf, recorded that historical costumes enabled a kind of embodied cognition. After providing a brief account of period interest in historically-accurate fancy dress, this article examines a range of Punch cartoons published between 1913 and 1939. I argue that cartoonists used satire to position the costuming trend as rooted in self-aggrandizement. Instead of depicting characters that learn about the past by wearing historical garb, Punch represents them attempting to transcend their social class or to assume hyperbolic gender roles through costume. While skeptical of the value of wearing historical fancy dress, the accuracy with which Punch cartoonists represent period costumes indicates that they too saw fashion as offering a mediated form of historical knowledge. Collectively, the magazine presented a visual guide to the styles of the past while suggesting that readers can avoid embarrassing themselves by reading about, rather than wearing, historical garb.

  PublisherDOI

• Modernism and Middlebrow through the Eyes of Object Studies

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2020-01-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter argues that an object-orientated approach puts texts from a range of cultural registers into dialogue with one another and fruitfully reconfigures how a high modernist work like Virginia Woolf’s <italic>Three Guineas</italic> might be read on its own. After providing examples of how a range of British and American authors and illustrators (including Rachel Ferguson, Winifred Kirkland, James Joyce, Bert Thomas, and Woolf) represent second-hand attire, the chapter examines the new tools and resources available to scholars that make a research project organized around objects possible. The chapter concludes by examining challenges to object-oriented study, including the difficulty of determining the range and scope of a project and the resistant qualities of things themselves. A gown designed by Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young, a court dressmaker who produced the garments worn by Virginia and Vanessa Stephen when they made their society debut, serves as an example of what we can and cannot know about objects and the people who possessed them.

  PublisherDOI

• Modernism and Middlebrow through the Eyes of Object Studies

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  • Art history
  PublisherDOI

• Modernism, Sex, and Gender

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2019-01-01 · 20 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Modernism, Sex, and Gender is an up-to-date and in-depth review of how theories of gender and sexuality have shaped the way modernism has been read and interpreted from its inception to the present day. The volume explores four key aspects of modernist literature and criticism that have contributed to the new modernist studies: women’s contributions to modernism; masculinities; sexuality; and the intersection of gender and sexuality with politics and law. Including brief case studies of such writers as May Sinclair and Radclyffe Hall, this book is a valuable guide for those looking to understand the history of critical thought on gender and sexuality in modernist studies today.

  PublisherDOI

• Case Study: Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises

  UST Research Online (University of St. Thomas - Minnesota) · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Brief synopsis of recent gender and sexuality studies uncovering the novel's complicated and ambivalent representations of masculinity.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Allison Pease

  2 shared

• Trevor L. Williams

  1 shared

• Jane Garrity

  University of Colorado System

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., English

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1994

• M.A., English

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1991

• B.A., English

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1988

Awards & honors

• Dean’s Award for Excellence in Service by a Graduate Program…
• Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2007)
• Margaret Church Memorial Prize for best essay to appear in M…
• Strand Prize for best essay by a graduate student, Northwest…
• Cecil and Colonel John P. Long Prize for travel to archives,…