Susan Gubar is Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University Bloomington, where she joined the faculty in 1973 and was named University Distinguished Professor. She earned her B.A. from City College of New York in 1965, M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1968, and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1972. A pioneering figure in feminist literary criticism, Gubar collaborated extensively with Sandra M. Gilbert on landmark works that reshaped the study of women's writing. Their co-authored book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, 1979) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The three-volume No Man’s Land series—The War of the Words (1988), Sexchanges (1989), and Letters from the Front (1994)—examined the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century. Gubar co-edited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1979), the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (1985, revised 1996 and 2007), and MotherSongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers (1995). Her solo publications include Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face (Oxford University Press, 1997), Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Indiana University Press, 2003), Judas: A Biography (W.W. Norton, 2009), Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer (W.W. Norton, 2012), Reading and Writing Cancer (W.W. Norton, 2016), Late-Life Love: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2018), and Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (W.W. Norton, 2021).

Gubar's research interests encompass gender and literature, feminist poetics, misogyny, racial and social identities, Holocaust poetry, and illness narratives. She directed NEH Summer Seminars in 1981 and 1991, served as President of the Modern Language Association in 1996, and held positions such as Chair of the Board of Supervisors for the English Institute at Harvard University (1991). Her distinguished career includes fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1983-84), Rockefeller Foundation, and Princeton University's University Center for Human Values (2001-2002), as well as teaching awards like the Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching (1986) and IU Trustees Teaching Award (2002). Honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013), American Philosophical Society (2011), National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award (2013), Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (2008), and the Modern Language Association Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award (2020). Gubar retired from Indiana University earlier than planned following a 2008 ovarian cancer diagnosis.

Professional Email: gubar@indiana.edu