Professor
College
Department
Phone
Location
Demergasso-Bava Hall DBH266C
My current pursuits lie mainly in two areas: studying modernism and writing poetry.
On the scholarly front, I have written two books about British modernism and the history of intimacy. I’m currently working on a third book about African American modernism and ideas of progress.
I am a member of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), at whose conferences I regularly organize panels and present papers. Graduate students who are interested in applying to conferences—including those who would like to attend MSA with me—are encouraged to contact me.
On the creative front, my new book of poetry, Breathe Again: A Polyphony, is being released Sept 1, 2026. I previously served as Faculty Advisor to Penumbra, our campus’s student-run literary and art journal.
I’ll be on sabbatical (not teaching) during AY 2026-27 to work on my third scholarly book, but please get in touch with questions, or just to catch up. I’ll be on campus regularly and can make appointments for in-person meetings.
Here are links to my books of scholarship and poetry.
B. A.: UC Berkeley (1992)
M. A. and Ph.D.: University of Wisconsin-Madison (1997, 2004)
Book
Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form after Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History. Bloomsbury Academic Press (2023). 268 pp. This book examines what “progress” can mean in our uncertain times. Has social justice advanced since the Enlightenment revolutions of the late eighteenth century? If so, what about intimacy: have the relationships between friends, lovers, spouses, and parents and their children grown freer and more egalitarian over time? How do some of today’s major novelists explore such questions? What inspiration do they derive from modernist experimentalism in general, and in particular from writers associated with the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Sigmund Freud?
Book
Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge University Press (2011). 272 pp. Reinvention suggests a new way of thinking about how literary modernism responded to cultural modernity. When modernist-era writers (c. 1900-1930) reacted against the constraints of the Victorian era (1837-1901), they did so ambivalently. Some of their works expressed anti-essentialist ideas about sexual selfhood, doubting Victorians’ conservative assumptions about maleness, femaleness, and sexual orientation—but nonetheless valued marriage and monogamy on pragmatic grounds. Other modernist works reproduced the Victorians’ essentialist ideas about sexual selfhood, but nonetheless critiqued marriage as imprisoning for women. In these ambivalent responses to the ideals of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, modernists dramatized the complex dynamics of historical change.
Links to Selected Reviews of Reinvention
https://muse-jhu-edu.libproxy.csustan.edu/article/480197
https://muse-jhu-edu.libproxy.csustan.edu/article/534081
Chapters
Keyword chapter: “Intimate/intimacy.” The Routledge Companion to Virginia Woolf. 3,000 words. Expected publication: 2027.
“Bloomsbury, Friendship, and Love.” The Cambridge History of the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Derek Ryan. 2025. 225-41.
“Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and the Future.” Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross. Bloomsbury Academic. 2018. 30-44.
“Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Intimacy.” A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman. Wiley-Blackwell. 2016: 359-75.
Poetry Book
Breathe Again: A Polyphony. Cathexis Northwest Press (2026).
Breathe Again: A Polyphony carries readers into the minds of young and old men and women, from the past and present, alone and connected to one another — reminiscing and planning, grieving and imagining. Their varied and partial journeys leave readers in uncertain hope.
"In carefully crafted, poignant verse, Jesse Wolfe examines the mutability of existence. Vivid details of circumstance are interwoven with philosophical insight in fascinating vignettes peopled with myriad subjects whose varied perspectives exemplify the human condition. With each reading, Breathe Again: A Polyphony expands our understanding of interconnectedness and strengthens our appreciation for human multiplicity."
— Linda Scheller, author of Laurels and The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street
"This volume, like a musical polyphony, blends independent yet harmonizing personas of disparate ages and personalities. These voices evoke far-flung lands—from Andalusia to Milwaukee, from Japan to Seattle—and different eras, from 1768 Amsterdam to modern-day Los Angeles. Readers encounter grateful spouses with intact families and lonely people seeking wholeness. Jesse Wolfe’s poems are dense, elliptical, and often enigmatic, but they are well worth the attention of readers willing to undergo these journeys of the imagination."
— Salvatore Salerno, emeritus Poet Laureate of Modesto (2020–24)
Jesse Wolfe is the author of one poetry chapbook, En Route, also published by Cathexis Northwest Press, and two scholarly books about British modernist literature. He teaches English at California State University, Stanislaus, and lives in Turlock, California, with his wife and twin daughters.
Poetry Chapbook
En Route. Cathexis Northwest Press (2020). This debut collection meditates on the journeys that carry people through life. Its three sections focus on individuals, couples, and families. Its speakers, drawn from various backgrounds, offer a mosaic of consciousness, as people strive and introspect, suffer and heal, each of them en route through their overlapping stories.