Susan Lanser

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Susan S. Lanser is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Brandeis University. Her scholarly interests encompass eighteenth-century studies, the French Revolution, feminist thought, narrative theory, and the history of gender and sexuality. She has written or edited four books, most recently an edition of Helen Maria Williams's Letters Written in France in Summer 1790 (2001). She is currently completing The History of Sexuality: Sapphic Subjects and the Making of Modernity. Her many essays include "The Novel Body Politic," "Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, and the Politics of Color in America," "Toward a Feminist Narratology," and "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire." Lanser holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She taught at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland before joining the Brandeis faculty in 2001. She was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, and she served for ten years as an editor of the journal Feminist Studies. She has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Institute and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her essay "Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts" won the MLA's Crompton-Noll Award in 1999.