B.A. Brown University (1986); Ph.D. Johns Hopkins (1995). Sharon Marcus specializes in the literature of nineteenth-century England and France, with an emphasis on the novel; theater and performance; architecture and urbanism; and gender and sexuality. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999), which received an honorable mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature, and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: 2007), which has been translated into Spanish and won the Perkins Prize for best study of narrative, the Albion prize for best book on Britain after 1800, the Alan Bray Memorial award for best book in queer studies, and a Lambda Literary award for best book in LGBT studies. In 2009, with Stephen Best, she edited a special issue of Representations on “The Way We Read Now.” On July 1, 2014, Marcus became Dean of Humanities. Her priorities as dean of humanities include supporting teaching and research; promoting collaboration across departments, schools, and divisions; and developing a strategic plan to make the humanities more digital, more public, and more global.
Recent publications include essays in PMLA, Victorian Studies, Social Research, Theatre Survey, The Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature, and The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. She is the editor of a special issue of Public Culture on “Celebrities and Publics in the Internet Era” (2014) and a founder and Editor in Chief of Public Books, an online review of books, arts, and ideas. A fellow of the New York Institute for Humanities, Marcus is also on the advisory boards of the journals Nineteenth-Century Literature, Public Culture, and the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemparaine. The recipient of Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and ACLS fellowships, and, at Columbia, a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, she is currently writing a book about theatrical celebrity in the nineteenth century.