Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; American theatre history; the development of feminist criticism; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare; the role  literature can play in the fight against racism; the place of humor and satire in movements for social justice; digital humanities; and the challenge of doing transnational American Studies. Although much of her work has centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldua, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Malkiel,  Tillie Olsen, and Walt Whitman. Much of her work has focused on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past.

After receiving her B.A.from Yale College (summa cum laude, phi beta kappa), she stayed on at Yale for a masters degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow,  has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and has been a Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over one hundred articles, essays, columns, and reviews. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in Turkey, Japan, and Korea. Her most recent book is Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (named runner-up for the best book award in the general nonfiction category, London Book Festival, 2015) (Rutgers University Press, 2015). She is also the author of: From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985); Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book " by Choice) (Oxford, 1993); Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford, 1997);  and Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).  She is the editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009), the Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain(Oxford, 2002), "Is He Dead? " A New Comedy by Mark Twain (University of California, 2003), Mark Twain's Book of Animals (University of California Press, 2009), and The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work (Library of America, 2010). She is also a producer of the adaptation of Twain's "Is He Dead? " which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award (Since it closed on Broadway, it has had 342 productions in 47 states and Australia, Canada, China, Romania, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom). She is the co-editor of Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford, 1994);People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin, 1996); The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America (M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910 (Arizona Quarterly, 2005); 'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar (Random House, 2005), Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition (Prentice-Hall, 2006), Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition (Prentice-Hall, 2011), and a special issue of African American Review devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's "Race and American Culture " book series with Arnold Rampersad.

She has served as President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America. In addition, she was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and has been chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division. She has given keynote talks during the last ten years at  conferences in Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Kolkata,  Kunming, Kyoto,  La Coruña, Lisbon, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and twice on the front page of the New York Times Arts section. In 2009 she was awarded the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain."

The Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, she is Director of Stanford's American Studies Program. She served as  a member of the Board of Governors of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, and was a member of the international jury for the prestigious 2013 Francqui Prize awarded to an outstanding young scholar in Belgium. She is a founding Editor of the online Journal of Transnational American Studies [see http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/march11/fishkin-publishes-american-studies-journal-030409.html ]    

Her current project is a  collaborative transnational, bilingual research project dealing with the Chinese Railroad Workers whose labor helped establish the wealth that allowed Leland Stanford to build Stanford University.   The goal of the Chinese Railroad Workers Project at Stanford  is to try to recover their experience and their world more fully than ever before, and to understand how these workers have figured  in cultural memory in the U.S. and China. She is co-director of the CRWP with Gordon H. Chang, the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford, Professor of History, and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies. [See http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/june/railroad-chinese-laborers-061715.html ] The Chinese Railroad Workers Project has received support from the President of Stanford, the UPS Fund at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.