Professor Marilyn Reizbaum
Marilyn Reizbaum is the Harrison King McCann Professor of English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
She works in the areas of modernist studies, contemporary Scottish and Irish literatures and film, Jewish cultural studies, the history of ideas. Her most recent book, Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism, considers the intersection between turn of the 20th century degeneration theories such as eugenics and Jewish representation, in the development of modernist literatures and art, taking into account such ideas as ‘purity’, ‘fitness’, and artistic form. She has written widely on the work of James Joyce; about other modernist writers, such as Katherine Mansfield, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf; and other Irish writers—Eavan Boland and Evelyn Conlon. Her current projects include a monograph on Muriel Spark’s literary style, “The Art of Ridicule,” and forthcoming essays on “Philip Roth’s Jewish Debility” and, with Maud Ellmann, “Missing Encounters” in Joyce’s Dubliners. She will be continuing her collaborative work with Professor Ellmann at Clare Hall this spring.
Select publications
- Reizbaum, Marilyn. Unfit. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
- Reizbaum, Marilyn. James Joyce’s Judaic Other. Stanford University Press, 1999.
- Devlin, Kimberly and Reizbaum, Marilyn, editors. Ulysses—En-gendered Perspectives: Eighteen new Essays on the Episodes. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
- “Making Jewishness Transparent and Transparent Jew-ish,” in for collection on the series Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family, eds, Brett Krutzsch and Nora Rubel (Rutgers University Press, 2024), pp. 229-244 .
- “Riff-raff: Evelyn Conlon’s “Two Gallants” in TELLING TRUTHS: EVELYN CONLON AND THE TASK OF WRITING, ed., M. Teresa CANEDA-CABRERA (Peter Lang, 2023), 77-92.
- “The ‘Little Savage from New Zealand’ in ‘Bliss.’” Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories, edited by Enda Duffy et al., Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2020, pp. 45–59.
- “Waiting for Godot at The Mandelbaum Gate”
Textual Practice Volume 32, 2018 – Issue 9: The Prime of Muriel Spark: A Centenary Retrospect: 1593-1613 - “The Stranger Spark,” The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark, Edited By: Michael Gardiner and Willy Maley, Edinburgh University Press, 2010
- “Yiddish Modernisms: Red Emma Goldman,” Modern Fiction Studies 51.2 (2005) 482-483
Select awards
- Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 2012
- Kenan Fellowship, Bowdoin College, 2004-05
- Fulbright Teaching Award, Tel Aviv University, 1994
- Fulbright Western European Research Grant–(Scotland and Ireland), 1988
Further Links
Bowdoin faculty webpage:
https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/mreizbau/index.html
Left Bank Documentary: The Women who Rescued James Joyce’s Ulysses ((d. Lisa Reznik); Joyce and the Jews:
https://vimeo.com/user9333516/joyceandthejews
