On July 1, 2025, Diana Fuss, the Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English, moves to emeritus status. To celebrate and honor Diana and her service to the Department of English, and to capture how it has been to have her as a colleague and to be a colleague of hers, faculty have shared the memories and appreciations collected here.
Tributes from English Department Faculty
Diana is one of the reasons I came to Princeton University. Her pioneering theoretical work in feminism, Frantz Fanon, and elegy was a model of the kind of generalist I wanted to become. — Simon Gikandi
Diana’s contributions to her many fields, and her unending curiosity about new fields, has been one of the ways that she restores my hope in our profession. Diana is no skeptical gatekeeper but a brilliant and capacious scholar — a trained semiotician — who understands how the fundamentals of literary and cultural theory are not only alive and well but thriving in a digital age. She was the interim chair of the department when I was hired in 2006, and she was the reason I came to Princeton. She believed in me. She believes in people — all her graduate students will tell you this — and she practices that belief by seeing past so much of the distractions that cloud our profession to the generous collaboration that is reading and thinking and talking about literature, media, culture, and representation. But this takes a kind of balanced openness and rigor, both of which she has in spades. We will lose one of our hardest working and most ethical colleagues, and we feel the absence of her informed and balanced wisdom and kindness in every room of McCosh. — Meredith Martin
As I saw most clearly when Diana and I edited a book together, her ability to attend to the smallest of details without ever losing sight of the big picture — to see both the forest and the trees — is one of her superpowers. It’s a talent Diana brings to every endeavor, in her teaching as well as her scholarship, in her friendships as well as her service. — William A. Gleason
Brilliant, fair, compassionate: those are the words that come to mind when thinking of Diana. Over the years, in departmental meetings, I often find myself using Diana as a model of integrity and grace. She will be missed! — Anne A. Cheng
Diana Fuss chaired the search committee that hired me and she was a big reason why I decided to join the faculty at Princeton. From the first time I met her, she was a superb mentor and a role model for the kind of scholar and colleague that I wanted to be. She always has supportive and affirming words for her colleagues. She is incredibly astute, able to distill the key point of a scholar’s work in a seemingly simple phrase or sentence. I recall her attentively listening to a departmental talk that I gave on the research that became Unscripted America and she explained the contradictory elements of the archive I was trying to conceptualize in the talk as enacting a process of “preservation through erasure.” That phrase stuck with me, and I found its way into the introduction to my book. Diana elegantly encapsulated what I was still struggling to articulate. — Sarah Rivett
How to describe Diana's generosity, spirit and intelligence in a few sentences? My first meeting with Diana was as a graduate student at Harvard, when she kindly agreed to give the keynote for our graduate conference one year. Diana came to every single panel and session and chatted to every participant about their work and ideas. This seemed totally exceptional — but turns out to be entirely characteristic. When I came to Princeton as junior faculty, Diana gave me wonderful advice and wise counsel, ranging from an intervention about my CV format (fix it!), to brilliant and kindly feedback on my work on A Journal of the Plague Year, to edits on a chapter I was drafting about 18th century waste. In later years, I taught and worked with Diana in many contexts and she has only ever been intelligent, rigorous, thoughtful and above all honest and straightforward about what she thinks. There aren't many scholars and teachers like Diana in the world and I feel fortunate to have worked with her for so many years. I have learned so much about scholarship, teaching, meeting decorum, wise decision-making and being a good human. I will miss her. — Sophie Gee
It's really not possible to imagine the department without her…In Diana Fuss, sharp attention, theoretical brilliance, moral stamina, and sly wit are somehow a single faculty. Her services to her colleagues and to the University at large, and to her students, undergraduate and graduate, have been unending. In all my time at Princeton English has been led by her example. — Jeff Dolven
I met Diana Fuss when she was a graduate student at Brown and working hard on what would be her dazzling debut, Essentially Speaking. She was canny about an important problem, the resort to essential categories in critical analysis. I met her again when she came to Princeton, and was thriving as an energetic assistant professor when I joined the faculty. Diana is brilliant, collegial, as devoted to her classes and students as she is remarkable in her professional profile. She’s served the department well in a number of capacities, and took on a temporary chairmanship during a fraught period. She comes to department meetings fully prepared, with her yellow-line notepad ready to support her attentive work to matters large and small. I had a playful habit of finding various iterations of “fuss” in the news papers and made her a set of bookmarks, some reading “no fuss.” It’s hard to imagine a department in the latter form. It’s been a pleasure to be here with Diana though her entire career! — Susan Wolfson
The obvious aspect of Diana’s contribution was her kindness. But “kindness” isn’t sufficient; she was rigorously, miraculously kind — as if her mission was to be supportive and to avoid causing harm. The sensitivity and forethought that went into this mission always amazed me. I could give many examples. But what amazed me even more was how she combined this miraculous kindness with such intellectual creativity, curiosity, and brilliance. — Joshua Kotin
Contributions to talks and seminars, often no more than a single phrase summarizing and synthesizing long and complex arguments and thus rendering them available to the uninitiated — Jeff Nunokawa
In English Department News
Fuss has recently graced these pages hooding 2025 doctoral graduates Kyra Morris and Sylvia Oronato in the Graduate School's 2025 Hooding and Recognition Ceremony, and earlier that day, in the English department's Class Day audience (second photo in the gallery), where, unbeknownst to her until its moment arrived, the English department was to present her with a gift. The gift is visible on her desk after her return to her from receiving it.
Fuss's Cotsen Family Faculty Fellowship for academic years 2013-14 through 2015-16 is the most recent such award to Department of English faculty before this spring's award to Tamsen Wolff, for academic years 2025-26 through 2027-28.