Susan Laura Mizruchi (July 13, 1959) is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Education and academic career
Mizruchi received her B.A. in English and in history from Washington University in St. Louis in 1981 and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985. In 1986 she joined Boston University as an assistant professor of English. She was promoted to associate professor in 1992 and full professor in 1998. In 2017 she was named the inaugural William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities.
Among her honors and grants, Mizruchi has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Commission.
Since 2016 Mizruchi has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities (BUCH). Under her directorship, BUCH has hosted forums on “Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age” (2017), “Humanities Approaches to the Opioid Crisis” (2018), and “Can We Talk: Dialogue and Debate in the Contemporary Academy” (2019).
In 2020, the Teagle Foundation awarded BUCH a grant to develop "The One & the Many at BU," a summer residential humanities program for Boston-area high school students.
Writing and academic work
Mizruchi's short story "Like a Rose Rabbi" appeared in the Winter 1983 issue of the Kansas Quarterly (now the Arkansas Review).
Mizruchi’s first book, The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser (Princeton UP, 1988), examines acts of historical narration in American literature. The book includes readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Henry James' The Wings of the Dove (1902), and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925). Writing in the New England Quarterly, Amy Kaplan praised Mizruchi for "persuasively discovers[ing] the pressure of history everywhere, and ... acutely gaug[ing] its impact on precisely those texts that seem to float freely above historical contingency."
Mizruchi's second book, The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton UP, 1998), looks at sacrifice in American literature and social theory of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book coordinates the rise of the field of sociology with literary representations of sacrifice, reading the social theory of Émile Durkheim and W. E. B. Du Bois alongside the fiction of Herman Melville and Henry James. A feature on the book appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, noting Mizruchi's standing at the forefront of "a growing number of scholars who approach religion in American life through interdisciplinary study." Nan Goodman's review in American Literature highlighted Mizruchi's treatment of literary realism, commending "Mizruchi's recognition that realism interacted with others theories of social order—the new disciplines of sociology and psychology, for example—[as] one of the many things that makes her book so significant." In a review for the American Journal of Sociology, Alan Sica praised the book's "innovative and thickly constructed interdisciplinary writing," labeling it "excellent social theory."
In 2005, Mizruchi’s "Becoming Multicultural: Culture Economy, and the Novel, 1860-1920" appeared in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 3, Prose Writing, 1860-1920 (Cambridge UP). The other contributions to that volume are Richard H. Brodhead's "The American Literary Field, 1860–1890"; Nancy Bentley's "Literary Forms and Mass Culture, 1870–1920"; and Walter Benn Michaels' "Promises of American Life, 1880–1920." Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, the eight volumes of The Cambridge History of American Literature cover poetry, prose writing, and criticism from 1590 to the end of the twentieth century. In a review in the Journal of American Studies, Richard Gray called The Cambridge History of American Literature "without doubt and without any serious rival, the scholarly history for our generation."