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Louise Hornby is Associate Professor of English at UCLA. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges the spaces between literary criticism and art history, and she teaches courses modernist and contemporary literature, photography, film, and visual culture.

She is the author of Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film (Oxford, 2017), which traces the photographic signature of stillness in novels and films of the early twentieth century. Her current book project, provisionally titled Bad Walks, is about the postural, moral, and political implications of simply putting one foot in front of the other. In the book, she pays particular attention to moments when something goes awry—missteps, stumbles, dizzy spells, falls, deviations, trespasses, and refusals—challenging a postural ethics that relies implicitly on walking’s steady continuity or uprightness as a moral and aesthetic principle. Like much of her work, this book is essentially interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together a broad corpus of materials from 20th- and 21st-century art and literature, literary studies, art theory, disability studies, performance studies, and philosophy.

She has recently written a series of essays about the weather, the elements, and non-possessive ecologies in contemporary visual art and literature, which have appeared or are forthcoming in Representations, OCTOBER, Environmental Humanities and Modernism/modernity. With Alex Purves in Classics, she co-organized an interdisciplinary conference entitled called Elemental Readings I: Air, for which they were awarded a Luskin Thought Leadership Grant in 2023. She runs the 20/21 Working Group and Finnegans Wake Reading Group in the English department and was the president of the Modernist Studies Association from 2023-2024.

She earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and BA in Linguistics and Literature from Reed College. Prior to joining the faculty of UCLA, she taught at Tulane University.

Selected Publications

Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film (Oxford University Press, 2017).

“Elemental Suicide” Representations (forthcoming)

“The Air Outside,” OCTOBER (forthcoming)

“The Middle Ground of Light,” Textual Practice (forthcoming)

“Walking Badly,” Representations 160.1 (2022): 90-118.

“On the Verge of Tears,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus Visualities Forum, 5.1 (May 2020)

“Downwrong: The Pose of Tiredness,” Modern Fiction Studies Special Issue on Modernism and Disability 65.1 (2019): 207-227.

“Film’s Atmospheric Setting,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus. Cluster on Modernist Setting (March 2018).

“Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities 9.1 (May 2017): 60-82.

“Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan,” Grey Room 41 (Fall 2010): 48-71.

“The Cameraless Optic: Anna Atkins and Virginia Woolf,” ELN, Special Issue on Photography and Literature, 44.2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 87-101.

“Visual Clockwork: Photographic Time and the Instant in ‘Proteus,’” James Joyce Quarterly, Special Section on Joyce and Cinema, 42.1-2 (Summer 2006): 49-68.