FACULTY & STAFF
Michael Gorra
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language & Literature
 |
Send E–mail |  |
Office: Seelye Hall 401 |  |
Phone: 585–3305 |
Office hours for Fall 2012: M 2:30-3:30, Th 2:00-3:00 & by appt.
Michael Gorra came to Smith in 1985, after getting his A.B. at Amherst and his Ph.D. at Stanford. He works primarily with 19th and 20th century fiction, concentrating on the history and development of novelistic form. His upper-division courses include the Victorian Novel, Modern British Fiction, a class on contemporary fiction called The Novel Now, a 200-level class on William Faulkner, and seminars on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the work of Henry James. In the Comparative Literature program he has taught classes on travel writing and the 19th century short story. He also teaches a first-year seminar on the 19th century European novel called Ambition and Adultery, and in Fall 2013 will offer a new first-year seminar called Reading the Civil War.
Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, along with a National Book Critics Circle award for his work as a reviewer. For Penguin he has written introductions to novels by Graham Greene and R.K. Narayan, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, Travel + Leisure, Slate, BookForum, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and elsewhere. His travel essays have twice been included in the annual volumes of Best American Travel Writing.
As editor he has compiled a Penguin volume called The Portable Conrad (2007) and the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (2009). Current projects include a volume of James’s tales about artists and writers for Penguin, along with a revision of the NCE of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Gorra’s most recent book is Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012). Earlier books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997); and The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990).
