English Expert - Carol Shloss

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Carol Shloss
Consulting Professor of English

Biography


Carol Shloss is the author of four books: Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, Gentlemen Photographers and Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. She continues on the editorial boards of the Joyce Studies Annual and College Literature. She is currently at work on her next book about Ezra Pound and his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz: The Real Estate of the Pounds.  Since coming to Stanford in 2000, she has taught courses on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Women Writers and the Modern Experimental Novel, Modern Irish Literature, Modernism and the Cinema, Novels into Film and Jane Austen on Film.

Shloss was educated at Swarthmore, Harvard and Brandeis University. She has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, West Chester. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In 1994 she won the Fellowship for Creative Non-Fiction Writing from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts.  Prior to coming to Stanford, she held research positions at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College at Harvard, the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke University, the Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio, Italy, the Alice Paul Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Center for the Cross Cultural Study of Women at Oxford University, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

These days, Shloss is also known for speaking out about issues of fair use and intellectual property rights.  Her knowledge and passion stems from the first-hand experience of a lawsuit against the James Joyce Estate regarding her work on Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter.  Between the years 1988 to 2000, Shloss devoted herself to writing a book about Lucia Joyce, but in 200o, faced with the threat of lawsuit from Stephen James Joyce, she was forced to delete portions of her manuscript before publishing the book.  Shloss now advocates for free cultural exchange of ideas, criticizing the pressures and limitations from estates that control materials long after the writers who generated them have died.

 

Key Works

  • Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
  • In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer.  Oxford University Press, 1987.
  • Gentlemen Photographers.  Northeastern University Press, 1987.
  • Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies.  Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

 

Prof. Shloss in the News