Susan Cannon Harris
Susan Cannon Harris is Professor of English. Her research and teaching interests are in Irish literature, Irish and American drama, performance theory, gender studies, queer theory, comparative literature, and LGBTQ fiction. Her most recent book is Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics, and the International Left, 1892-1964 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Other Revolutions shows how Irish playwrights mediated between the sexual and the socialist revolutions, and traces their impact on left theater in Europe and America from the 1890s to the 1960s. Drawing on archival research, it reconstructs the engagement of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett with socialists and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Professor Harris’s first book, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, was published in 2002 by the Indiana University Press. Gender and Modern Irish Drama won the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book and the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature at the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2003.
Professor Harris has also published articles in PMLA, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, James Joyce Quarterly, Eire-Ireland, Victorian Literature and Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, Breac, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. Most recently, Harris contributed a chapter on Yeats’s early plays to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats. She is currently working on a project about theater in the digital age.
Professor Harris has received the Kaneb Teaching Award (2005), the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2015), and the Marian Mullin Hancock Award in Gender Studies (2019).