Professor Emerita Susan Lanser wins the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award

Brandeis Professor Emerita Susan Lanser has won the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s 2020 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award recognizes “outstanding scholar-teachers who have made sustained contributions to narrative studies over the course of their careers.” In its Sept. 20 award announcement, the International Society for the Study of Narrative praised Lanser for her contributions as an “eighteenth century scholar and pioneering feminist narrative theorist.”

Lanser is the author of “The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction” and “Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voices,” which are both considered important classics in narratology, the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception.

Along with her work in feminist studies narratology, Lanser has published widely in eighteenth-century European studies. Her newest monograph “The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830” won the Joan Kelly Award in Women’s History and Theory from the American Historical Association, received honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies, and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Lanser has also co-edited three books: “Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology,” Helen Maria Williams’s 1790 “Letters Written in France,” and “Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions.” Her articles on eighteenth-century, feminist, and narratological topics have appeared in such journals as PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Feminist Studies, and Narrative.

She served as president of both the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2015 and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2017-2018.