2020—Susan Lanser
Susan S. Lanser is Professor Emerita of English, Women and Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. Born in 1944, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin. As she said in an interview, “[her] interest in narratology was overdetermined: by [her] passion for writing fiction, by [her] fascination with fictional form, and by the critical moment in which narratology and feminism were both emerging as academic projects” (Narrative Theory and Poetics: 5 Questions, 2012). A pioneer in the field of feminist narratology since her 1986 article “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” she is the author of The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (1981) and Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992, Chinese translation, 2002), which are now considered important classics of the discipline. Along with her investments in narratology and feminist studies, she has a strong interest in eighteenth-century Europe. In this area, she has published Letters Written in France by Helen Maria Williams (with Neil Fraistat, 2001) and The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830 (2014, winner of the Joan Kelly Prize in Women’s History and runner-up for the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies), in which she reverses the typical trajectory of the history of sexuality: “instead of asking, for example, what we can learn about sexuality from the eighteenth century, I ask what we can learn about the eighteenth century from (representations of) sexuality. I look for ideas, tropes, and textual patterns that connect sexual representation to larger concerns of the times” (Diacritics, 2016). Susan S. Lanser has also published widely in specialized journals and collective volumes, and she has coedited two books: Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology (Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, 1995) and Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (with Robyn Warhol, 2015). Her contribution to the last book is significantly titled “Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology” and establishes a dialogue, after more than thirty years, with her 1986 manifesto. She advocates the importance of extending the corpus of narratology and of developing a historical narratology. She is also deeply interested in what she calls the politics of form and is currently working with Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan on the formal elements of Palestinian and Israeli narratives. She has directed during ten years the journal Feminist Studies and has been President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN, 2015) and of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS, 2016).