Diana Fuss

Title
Louis W. Fairchild Class of ‘24 Professor of English
Office Phone
Office
52 McCosh Hall
Office Hours

On Leave, AY23-24

Bio/Description

Diana Fuss, Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English, has taught at Princeton since 1988, after receiving her PhD from Brown University in English and Semiotics. She has taught undergraduate courses on a range of topics in the areas of criticism and theory, 19th and 20th century American and British literature, narrative and poetry, film and media, wilderness and environment, and love and language. Her more specialized graduate offerings have focused on such subjects as Body Parts, Architectural Interiors, The Senses, Contemporary Theory, Freud’s Toolbox, American Elegy, Modern Death, Modern Love, Keywords, Storytelling, and Pedagogy. She has also conducted the graduate pedagogy and dissertation seminars. In 2001 Fuss received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and more recently the University’s Cotsen Fellowship for Distinguished Research and Teaching.

Fuss is the author of Essentially Speaking (Routledge, 1989), Identification Papers (Routledge, 1995), The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (Routledge, 2004), and Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy (Duke, 2013). The Sense of an Interior won the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for outstanding scholarly book of the year. Fuss is also the editor of several volumes: Human, All Too Human (Selected Essays of the English Institute, 1996; ebook 2013), Pink Freud (1995), and Inside/Out (1991), which won both the ALA and VLS best book awards.

She is general editor, together with William A. Gleason, of The Pocket Instructor teaching series with Princeton University Press. The first volume, The Pocket Instructor: Literature (edited by Fuss and Gleason) appeared in 2016, with the second volume, The Pocket Instructor: Writing (guest edited by Amanda Irwin-Wilkins and Keith Shaw) forthcoming in Spring 2024. In 2023 Fuss’s new book, Wilderness Tales: 40 Stories of the North American Wild, appeared with Knopf.

Over the years Fuss has published on a variety of topics, from fashion photography to literary corpses to bereaved children to museum benches to flash fiction to teaching theory. Fuss has been a recipient of an NEH Fellowship Award, an ACLS Fellowship Award, a Princeton Old Dominion Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She has been Director of Graduate Studies, Graduate Job Placement Officer, Associate Chair, Acting Chair, and Search Officer. She has also served on a variety of University committees and boards, among them the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning Advisory Council, the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, the Faculty Committee on the Graduate School, the Gauss Seminars on Criticism, the Council of the Humanities and Committee on Humanistic Studies, the University Research Board, and the University Faculty Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements (C/3).

Selected Publications

Human, All Too Human (1996; 2013 Ebook)

Wilderness Tales (2023)