Suzanne Keen
Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English
Washington and Lee University
Dr. Suzanne Parker Keen, Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English, has taught at Washington and Lee University since 1995. This is her lucky thirteenth year at W&L.
Dr. Keen grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in 1979. She was educated at Brown (A.B. 1984; A.M. in Creative Writing 1986) and Harvard (M.A. 1987; Ph.D. in English, 1990). She began her teaching career at Yale University (1990-95). Dr. Keen teaches the novel, narrative, and postcolonial literature at Washington and Lee, where she is also an affiliate faculty member in the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability. In the summers, she joins the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English (Middlebury College), offering summer graduate courses to high school and middle school teachers pursuing Master’s degrees.
Dr. Keen is the author of five books: Empathy and the Novel (Oxford, 2007); Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001); Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation (Cambridge, 1998); a textbook, Narrative Form (Palgrave, 2003); and a volume of poetry, Milk Glass Mermaid (Lewis Clark, 2007). Her articles on a wide range of contemporary and Victorian writers appear in scholarly journals and in Commonweal Magazine.
Dr. Keen’s work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Commonwealth of Virginia, Commission for the Arts. Dr. Keen is a Rotarian and a Paul Harris Fellow. Her research and writing areas include literature and psychology, cognitive literary studies, and the novel in English.
Currently, Dr. Keen is at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and Victorian psychology and neurology. What can and does happen to real readers as a result of immersion in fictional worlds is her abiding interest. She lives with her husband, the historian Francis MacDonnell, and her son Jacob Whitcomb MacDonnell in Lexington, Virginia.
photo by Patrick Hinely