Department of English

Alumni Profiles

Graduates of the English department pursue a wide variety of fields after Brandeis — our alumni are professors, professionals, and more. Below are profiles of our master's program alumni.

Distinguished Alumni

Elaine Showalter, MA’64

After receiving her master's degree at Brandeis, Professor Showalter attended the University of California at Davis for her PhD. After that, she began teaching at Rutgers University and, later, at Princeton University. She retired from Princeton in 2003 and holds the position of Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita in the university's English department.

Professor Showalter's long list of publications include, among others, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009); Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents (2005); Teaching Literature (2003); Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001); Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siecle (1990); The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985); A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977); and Women's Liberation and Literature (1971), for which she edited. She has also written for popular non-academic publications in the past such as People –– where she served as television critic –– and Vogue.

Professor Showalter is perhaps best-known for her development of gynocriticism, a school of literary criticism that considers and studies women writers as an individual literary movement.