Susan Zlotnick

Susan Zlotnick is Professor of English on the Mary Augusta Scott Chair at Vassar College, where she has taught since 1989. She is affiliated with the Department of English, Women’s Studies, and the Victorian Studies Program, contributing to interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching.

Her research centers on nineteenth-century British literature, particularly the novel, with a focus on gender, class, and empire. She is a feminist literary critic whose work bridges history and literature. Her publications include the monograph Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and numerous articles on Victorian culture.

Her recent scholarly articles explore class mimicry, women’s labor in Brontë fiction, and critiques of industrial capitalism in the Victorian factory novel. These works reflect a consistent interest in how literature engages with social structures, especially middle-class identity and gentility as cultural habitus.

She is currently working on a book about middle-class identity in the mid-Victorian period, linking Bourdieusian theories of habitus to the formal qualities of the novel. She also co-teaches interdisciplinary courses, including a new global nineteenth-century studies course with historian Lydia Murdoch.

• BA, MA, PhD, University of Pennsylvania

She mentors students through First-Year Writing Seminars and upper-level courses in English and Women’s Studies, emphasizing close reading and critical writing. She is dedicated to undergraduate education and values Vassar’s close-knit academic community.

Professor Zlotnick actively engages with technology’s impact on reading and advocates for print-based novel reading. She is currently re-reading Jane Austen and recommends Middlemarch as essential reading for college students.