Tamar Katz has research interests in twentieth-century literature, with a focus on modernism, urban literature, memory, temporality, and gender studies.
Professor Katz works on 20th-century literature, focusing in particular on modernism, urban studies, and gender studies. Her first book, Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England (Urbana: U Illinois P, 2000), examined late-19th- and early-20th-century literary impressionism; it analyzed the way representations of consciousness took up broader cultural debates about private and public spheres, which changed as middle-class women moved into public life.
She is currently working on a book project entitled City Memories: Modernism and Urban Time in New York City. This book focuses on writing about New York City to rethink modernism's association of urban culture with the new. It analyzes early-twentieth-century representations of public spaces and memory, finding ways the city has been defined through loss and the movement backward in time. Chapters include "Urban Nostalgia and the Historical Novel," "Photographic Documentary and the City," "Mobility, Time, and the Segregated City in the New Negro Renaissance," "Crossing into the Nation: Immigrant Neighborhoods and Americanization," and "Anecdotal History: Mid-Century Journalism and the Anecdote."