The International Society for the Study of Narrative recognized Prof. Emerita Susan Lanser (ENG, WGS, COML) with the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award for her “sustained contributions to narrative studies,” according to a Sept. 20 BrandeisNOW article.

In the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s announcement of the award, Lanser was praised for advocating for “the importance of extending the corpus of narratology and of developing a historical narratology.”

Lanser received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction” (1981) and “Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice” (1992) are among her first articles. 

Besides Lanser’s expertise in narratology, the study of narrative structure and comparison of narratives, she is also interested in 18th-century European Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies per the Brandeis faculty guide. 

Lanser has co-edited two books entitled “Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions” (2015) and “Letters Written in France” (2001). Additionally, Lanser wrote “The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1803,” which was published in 2014. Lanser won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for this book in 2015, a prize “awarded annually for the book in women’s history and/or feminist theory that best reflects the high intellectual and scholarly ideals exemplified by the life and work of Joan Kelly,” according to the American Historical Association. Kelly was a feminist historian and author, known for her article “Did Women Have Renaissance?”

Lanser was president of the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies in 2015 and was the president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative from 2017-2018.

Lanser has taught a variety of courses at Brandeis, including “Jane Austen’s Eighteenth Century,” “How Fiction Works: Narrative in Theory and Practice” and “Gender and the Genealogy of the Novel.”