Susan Gubar

Susan Gubar

Professor Emeritus, English

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1972
  • M.A., The University of Michigan, 1968
  • B.A., City College of New York (CUNY), 1965

About Susan Gubar

From The Madwoman in the Attic, the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism (all with Sandra M. Gilbert) to Rooms of Our Own, my books have focused on gender and literature. In a turn toward racial and religious issues, I published Racechanges, Poetry after Auschwitz, and Judas. After a cancer diagnosis, I focused on illness in Memoir of a Debulked Woman, Reading and Writing Cancer, and a series of essays on living with cancer for The New York Times. In Still Mad, I resumed my collaborative work with Sandra Gilbert. Currently, I am studying very creative old ladies.

Selected Honors and Awards:

  • Senior Class Council Outstanding Teaching Award, Indiana University, 1975-76
  • NEH Summer Stipend, 1979
  • The Madwoman in the Attic nominated for The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, 1979
  • Co-director of NEH Summer Seminar on Feminism, Modernism, and Feminist Criticism, Summer 1981
  • NEH Fellowship for Independent Study and Research, 1981-82
  • The Pushcart Prize, 1982 (for “Blessings in Disguise”)
  • Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983-84
  • Indiana Committee for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, 1985
  • Ms. Woman of the Year, 1985 (with 11 others)
  • U.S.A. Today People Who Made a Difference, 1985
  • Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching, IU, 1986
  • Townsend Harris Medal, from The Alumni Association of the City College of New York, 1988
  • Board of Supervisors, English Institute, Harvard University, 1989-1992; Elected Chair of the Supervisors, 1991
  • Honorary Member of Phi Beta Kappa, City College’s Gamma Chapter, 1990
  • Director, NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, 1991
  • IU Office of Women’s Affairs Distinguished Scholar Award, 1991
  • IU College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Scholar Award, 1992
  • NEH Fellowship for Independent Study and Research, 1994-95
  • PMLA Advisory Committee, 1994-6
  • Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Virginia Foundation Institute on Violence, Culture, and Survival, Spring 1999
  • Resident, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, May 11-June 9, 2001
  • Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, September 2001-May 2002
  • IU Trustees Teaching Award, 2002
  • The Faculty Mentor Award, from the IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, 2003
  • Resident, The Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, April 19-May 20, 2004
  • IU College Arts and Humanities Institute Fellowship, Spring 2005
  • IU New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Spring 2006
  • University of Kansas’ Holmes Institute, Director, June, 2008
  • University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts and Science’s Alumni Fellow Award, 2008
  • The President’s Award in Excellence, IU, 2010
  • Elected member, The American Philosophical Society, 2011
  • National Book Critic Circle’s Lifetime Achievement Award, 2013
  • Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013
  • Natalie Davis Spingarn Writers Award from the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, 2014
  • MLA Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award, 2020

Journal Articles and Other Publications

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, co-edited with Sandra M. Gilbert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

Women Poets, Special Double Issue of Women’s Studies, co-edited with Sandra M. Gilbert (1980).

The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, co-edited with Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985; revised second edition 1996).

A Guide to “The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English”, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985; revised second edition 1996).

The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic, co-edited with Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1986); also published as a Special Double Issue of Women’s Studies (Vol. 13, no. 1 & 2 (1986).

The War of the Words, Volume I of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

Sexchanges, Volume II of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, co-edited with Joan Hoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)

English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism, Papers from the 50th Meeting of the English Institute, co-edited with Jonathan Kamholtz (New York: Routledge 1993).

Letters from the Front, Volume III of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

MotherSongs: Poetry by, for, and about Mothers, edited with Sandra M. Gilbert and Diana O’Hehir (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).

Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

Excerpts from the above appear in such collections as The Feminist Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore; Criticism: Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson; Feminisms: Gender and Literary Studies, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl; Dekonstrucktiver Feminismus: Literaturwissenschaft in Amerika, ed. Barbara Vinken, etc.

Also see Making Feminist History: The Literary Scholarship of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ed. William E. Cain (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994).

Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). A Selection of Reader’s Subscription Book Club.

Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). A Selection of Reader’s Subscription Book Club.

Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

An Annotated Edition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, with a critical introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2005).

Rooms of Our Own (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Honorable Mention Award from Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Reader, ed. with Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: Norton, 2007).

Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 3rd edition, ed. with Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: Norton, 2007).

Lo largo y lo corto del verso Holocausto, a Spanish translation in book form of “The Long and the Short of Holocaust Verse” (Argentina: Alcion Editora, 2007.

Judas: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). Listed in Magill’s Literary Annual of Best Books 2009.

True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School, edited with an Introduction (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).

Reading and Writing Cancer (W.W. Norton, 2016).

Late-Life Love: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2018).

Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, with Sandra M. Gilbert. W.W. Norton 2021.

Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists (in progress)