Diana Fuss

Louis W. Fairchild Class of ‘24 Professor of English

52 McCosh Hall

(609) 258-4063

dfuss@princeton.edu

Office Hours:
Thursdays 10:00am - 12:00pm and by appointment

Teaching and Research Interests:
Poetry, Poetics, and Aesthetics
American Literature
Literary Theory
Film and Media Studies
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies


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, and wilderness and environment. And she has taught more specialized graduate offerings on such subjects as Body Parts, Architectural Interiors, The Senses, Contemporary Theory, Freud’s Toolbox, American Elegy, Modern Death, Modern Love, Keywords, and Storytelling. 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), Pink Freud, and Inside/Out, which won both the ALA and VLS best book awards. She has also co-edited, with William A. Gleason, a collection of 101 exercises for the college classroom called The Pocket Instructor: Literature (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Over the years she has published on a variety of topics, from fashion photography to literary corpses to bereaved children to museum benches to flash fiction. Fuss has been a recipient of NEH and ACLS Fellowship Awards, a Princeton Old Dominion Fellowship, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She has been Director of Graduate Studies, Graduate Job Placement Officer, Associate Chair, and Acting Chair. She has also served on a variety of University committees, among them the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning Advisory Council, Faculty Committee on the Graduate School, Gauss Seminars on Criticism, Council of the Humanities and Committee on Humanistic Studies, University Research Board, and University Faculty Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements (C/3).