In her teaching and research, Mary Lou Emery focuses on transcultural Modernist Studies with special interests in British and Anglophone Caribbean literatures of the twentieth century.  She has published two books, Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Jean Rhys at “World's End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (University of Texas Press, 1990) as well as critical essays on writers such as Wilson Harris, C. L. R. James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Virginia Woolf.   Her chapters on Caribbean and global modernisms appear in Disciplining Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford University Press, 2012/ 2013).  Currently, she is writing about the portrayal in modernist fiction of transcultural forms of housing and the interior arts. 

She has received several teaching awards, including the President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence and the Graduate Mentor Award. Her courses include: Modernity and Plantation Modernism, Caribbean Literature and Culture, Modernist Women Writers, Virginia Woolf, and Modernist Arts in Britain.