About

I am an associate professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan with a courtesy appointment in Women & Gender Studies, having earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 and a BA from the University of Chicago in 1992.  As a visiting scholar in the late '90s, I learned about the discipline of historical geography at Royal Holloway, University of London in order to make sense of illustrated topographies of urban demolition, tourist guidebooks, and municipal commemoration projects in London and England at the turn of the twentieth century. My first book Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage (Cambridge UP 2008) studied the emplacement of literary/readers’ memory and the musealization of writers’ lives in England as components to early-twentieth-century urbanization and as contexts for understanding modernist literature. My second book project studies graphic arts in relation to modern literature from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. I teach courses on topics ranging from modernism to contemporary literatures, across media and genres, and with a recurrent emphasis on women writers and social history/gender politics. 

UM English Department faculty page: https://lsa.umich.edu/english/people/faculty/zemgulys.html

pronouns: she/her or xe/xyr