Susan Lanser, professor emerita at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, is being honored with the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. In the society’s announcement of the award, Professor Lanser was praised for “sustained contributions to narrative studies” and for advocating for “the importance of extending the corpus of narratology and of developing a historical narratology.”
In addition to Dr. Lanser’s expertise in narratology, the study of narrative structure and comparison of narratives, she is also interested in 18th-century European studies and women, gender and sexuality studies. She was president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2015 and was the president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative from 2017-2018.
Dr. Lanser has co-edited two books Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Ohio State University Press, 2015) and Letters Written in France (Broadview Press, 2001). Additionally, Dr. Lanser is the author of The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Professor Lanser is a graduate of Marquette University in Milwaukee and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.