Michèle Mendelssohn
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Michèle Mendelssohn is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Oxford. Her research spans the late 19th century to the present day and addresses questions of aesthetics, race, gender, sexuality and cultural politics in British, American and African American literature. Her recent biography of Oscar Wilde was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and a PEN America Biography Prize semi-finalist.
Her next book is based on the true story of one of the first woman-led expeditions to the Arctic. Other works in progress include essays on artificial intelligence, James Baldwin, Cynthia Ozick, modern Greece and queer travel writing. She warmly welcomes invitations from potential collaborators, publishers, and museum curators.
She joins the Paris IAS in October 2024 for a two-month writing residency as part of the Paris Oxford Program (POP), which brings together CNRS, Université Paris Cité and the CNRS, with the support of the Paris IAS.
Research Interests
Literature, Cultural History
POLAR X: Women’s narratives of polar encounters, extractivism and arctic exploration from the 19th century to the present
POLAR X offers an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to investigate for the first time the relationship between the removal of natural and ethnographically specific resources from the 19th century to the present day through the intersecting lenses of literature, politics, gender and indigeneity.
Key Publications
Making Oscar Wilde, Oxford University Press, 2018
Late Victorian into Modern, 1880-1920 Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr. (Oxford University Press, 2016)
"A Small Black Boy and Others: James Baldwin’s Essays as a Radical Framework for Understanding Henry James." Henry James Review (vol. 4, no. 3, fall 2023)"
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