Lily Sheehan's research and teaching interests are in late-19th and 20th-century British and American literature with a focus on modernism, visual and material culture, and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

Lily earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and joined Ithaca College's English department in the fall of 2010. At IC, she has taught courses on “Transatlantic Modernism” and “Fashion and Fiction in the Twentieth Century,” as well as “Introduction to Poetry” and “Approaches to Literary Study.” In the spring of 2012, she will offer a senior seminar on "Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group," which examines fiction and essays by Woolf in the context of the economic theories, visual art, and fiction produced by other artists and intellectuals who were part of London’s Bloomsbury Group in the early twentieth century. Lily also serves as a member of the steering committee of IC's Women's Studies Program.

Lily recently co-edited (with Ilya Parkins) an interdisciplinary collection of essays, Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (University Press of New England, 2011), which analyzes how fashion shaped ideas and practices of femininity in North America, Britain, and Western Europe from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. She contributed an essay to the collection entitled “The Face of Fashion: Race and Fantasy in James VanDerZee’s Photography and Jessie Fauset’s Fiction,” which discusses the role of dress in the photography and fiction of two artists during the Harlem Renaissance. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled “Modernism à la Mode,” which reveals how sartorial fashion shaped the form and perceived purposes of modernist literature.