Marc Shell

Professor Marc Shell is the Irving Babbit Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Harvard University. Before coming to Harvard University, Professor Shell taught in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1974-1986) and headed the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (1986-1991). His research is in three general areas: aesthetics and economics, Renaissance studies, and language and nationhood. His books include Children of the Earth (2001), a probing examination of nationhood and kinship; Art and Money (1995), a provocative examination of their interrelation; and Stutter (2006) and Polio and Its Aftermath (2005), which are the result of his most recent interest in disability studies within a cultural framework. Shell serves as co-director of the Longfellow Institute for the comparative study of non-English languages and literatures in the United States. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship (1990).