Sharon Marcus
Research Interests
19th Century British Literature, Europe, Gender, Sexuality, Queer Theory, Feminism, Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, Prose Fiction/ History of the Novel, Film, Media, and Visual Studies, Narrative and Rhetorical Theory, Political Theory, Marxism, and Critical Social Theory, Material Culture/ Object Studies, Britain
Biography
Sharon Marcus teaches at Columbia University, where she is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, specializing in nineteenth-century British and French culture. Her scholarship analyzes the cultural assignment of value in domains as diverse as architecture, social relationships, literary criticism, and performance culture.
Marcus earned her B.A. from Brown University and her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University, both in comparative literature. The recipient of Fulbright, ACLS Burkhardt, and Guggenheim fellowships, among others, Marcus is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999); Between Women: Marriage, Desire, and Friendship in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007); and The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2019). Her many articles include a landmark contribution to feminist theory, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: Towards a Theory and Practice of Rape Prevention” (1992), and the widely-cited “Surface Reading,” co-authored with Stephen Best (2009), which asked provocative questions about how critics interpret texts.
In 2012, Marcus co-founded Public Books, an online magazine dedicated to bringing cutting-edge scholarly ideas to a curious public. Her own public writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Pacific Standard, The Boston Globe, Vox, the Chronicle Review, and The Guardian.
In 2022, Marcus edited a new edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for the Norton Library. Her book on How to Give a Good Academic Talk (Princeton University Press, 2026) is forthcoming from the Princeton University Press “Skills for Scholars” series.
In 2024, Marcus was awarded the Mark Van Doren Teaching Prize.
