Susan Mizruchi

Susan L. Mizruchi is Professor of English Literature at Boston University.  She received B.A.’s in English and in History from Washington University in 1981 and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985.  Professor Mizruchi’s specialties are nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature; religion and culture; literary and social theory; literary history; and history of the social sciences.  She has taught courses in literature, gender, and film at Boston University for twenty-five years.  Publications include: The Rise of Multicultural America (North Carolina UP, 2008)  Becoming Multicultural: Culture, Economy, and the Novel, 1860–1920 (Cambridge UP 2005);  The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton UP, 1998); The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, & Dreiser (Princeton, 1988); and, as editor Religion and Cultural Studies, editor (Princeton UP, 2001) and contributor to The Norton Critical Edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1999).

She is the recipient of many academic honors, including year-long fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She is currently at work on three book-length projects: “Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work” under contract with Norton; a study of the overlap between politics and culture in the 1950’s (Oxford Culture Series); and A Novel in Four Acts.