FACULTY & STAFF

Michael Gorra
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language & Literature

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Office: Seelye Hall 401

Phone: 585–3305

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 current upper-division courses include the Victorian Novel, Modern British Fiction, a class on contemporary fiction called The Novel Now, and a seminar on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In 2012-13 he will offer a course on William Faulkner. 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.

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, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere.

His new book, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, is forthcoming in 2012. Earlier books include The English Novel at Mid-Century; After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie; and The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany. As an editor he has put together a volume called The Portable Conrad along with the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.