English Expert - Shelley Fisher Fishkin

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Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Professor of English, Director of American Studies Program

Biography

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; the development of feminist criticism; the relationship between public history and literary history; and the challenge of doing transnational American Studies. Although much of her work has centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldua, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tillie Olsen, and Walt Whitman.

Fishkin is a professor of English and Director of the American Studies program, as well as one of the leading scholars in American culture and literature, particularly on the work of Mark Twain.

A member of the first class of women to graduate from Yale College, she stayed on at Yale for a master’s degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies, before joining the Stanford faculty in 2003.  She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow, and has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender.  She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Fishkin is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Her work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, Spanish, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in Turkey, Japan, and Korea.

She was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and has been president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division. She recently finished a term as President of the American Studies Association, and gave keynote talks during the last four years at national American Studies conferences in China, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  She also organized the Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Conference at Stanford in 2006. She was a producer of the world premiere of Mark Twain’s Is He Dead?, adapted by David Ives and directed by Michael Blakemore at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway in 2007-2008.

 

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