Janet Gezari

Janet Gezari's writing has focused on the novels of the Brontés, the poetry of Emily Bronté, Victorian and modern novels, contemporary fiction in English and Bob Dylan. She regularly taught courses on the history of the English novel since Defoe, contemporary fiction in English and in translation, and Dylan (with Professor Charles Hartman). She retired in 2016.

Janet Gezari graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University and received her M. Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University. 

She was an early supporter of Women's Studies at Connecticut College and served as Acting Director of the program. She was Acting Director of Gender and Women Studies when the Fuller-Maathai chair was endowed and named. She has twice co-directed (with Prof. Emeritus Ed Brodkin) the college's Study Away Teach Away (SATA) program in Mysore, India, where she had the chance to teach English colonial novels and Anglophone Indian postcolonial novels.

Gezari is the editor of Emily Bronté: The Complete Poems (Penguin Press, 1991) and the author of Charlotte Bronté and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1993 and jointly awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy in 1994. Her book on Emily Bronté, Last Things: Emily Bronté's Poems, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. She has re-edited Charlotte Bronté's Shirley in the Oxford World Classics series and written a new introduction for The Selected Letters of Charlotte Bronté (Oxford University Press, 2010).

She worked on an annotated edition of Wuthering Heights (Harvard University Press, 2012) and is working on a book on late style in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Coetzee, Bob Dylan and Philip Roth.

In 2010, Gezari was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where she was working on late style. In 1997, she was given the Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Chair and received the Nancy Batson Nisbet Rash Research Scholar Award.

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