Retirement Date: 12-31-2019
Research Interests
Feminist literary criticism, Narrative, Poetry, Feminist Theory, Feminist Pedagogies, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Comparative literature, Early Modern Spanish literature, Contemplative Studies (Contemplative literature), Contemplative Practices.
Biographical Notes
Mary Gossy is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of Spanish and Comparative Literatures at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard, where she worked on Early Modern Narrative, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction with Barbara Johnson. Audre Lorde, too, has been an important influence.
Gossy is the author of three books: The Untold Story: Women and Theory in Golden Age Texts (Michigan UP, 1990), Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue (Michigan UP 1995), and Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Liverpool UP, 2009). Reading, writing, and teaching, as works of love, are at the core of her practice.
She has taught at all levels in Women's and Gender Studies; special topics have included courses on Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Dolls, Feminist Theory and Practice, Feminist Pedagogy, Deconstruction for Feminists. She has served as graduate director in Women's and Gender Studies and in Comparative Literature. In 2002 she won the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching (Rutgers), and in 2018 a Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching.
