Harvard Professor Is Selected Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence

The Robert L. Hess Planning Committee has announced that its 2007-2008 Scholar-in-Residence is Professor Marc Shell of Harvard.

A Quebec native who remains a Canadian citizen, Professor Shell is the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, as well as a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He is also a professor in the university’s undergraduate Literature Concentration and the graduate program in the History of American Civilization.

Shell received his bachelor's degree in English language and literature and social thought and institutions from Stanford University in 1968. He earned a master’s in 1972 and a doctor of philosophy degree in comparative literature in 1975 from Yale University.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Shell taught at SUNY/Buffalo from 1974 to 1986 and headed the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst from 1986 to 1991. At Harvard University he also has served as the chair of the Literature Concentration and the Department of Comparative Literature.

His research interests are broad, but lie mainly in five interconnected areas: money and language; nationhood, politics, and language difference; kinship, non-English literatures of the United States; and medical and disability studies. He has published extensively in these areas, and his books have been translated into a dozen languages. His essays have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and magazines.

Among Shell’s books are Art & Money; Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era; Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood; The End of Kinship: "Measure for Measure," Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood; American Babel: American Literatures from Abnaki to Zuni; Stutter; and Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture.

He said that he hoped his participation in the Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence program would help encourage in his audience "an appreciation for the Humanities." For further information about Professor Shell’s scholarship consult his website.

"He's absolutely incredible," said Broeklundian Professor Robert Viscusi, head of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and chair of the Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Committee. "I've been reading his work for thirty years."

Added Viscusi: "Each year we try to select a scholar whose interests and accomplishments are large enough and wide enough to interest a varied audience. Professor Shell fits these qualifications perfectly.

Shell's selection was announced at a welcoming brunch on Thursday, April 10, 2008. Later in the day he participated in a discussion of Multilingual America with students enrolled in American Studies 10: "Introduction to the American Experience," taught by Professor Joseph Entin.

He will be engaged in a series of discussions and other events with students and faculty members through Wednesday, April 16. For more information about these events, please call the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, 718.951.5847.