Margaret Homans designated the Housum Professor of English

Margaret Homans, newly named as the Bird White Housum Professor of English, focuses her research and teaching on literature that explores questions of gender, sexuality, power, and identity.

As Homans has practiced feminist (and, more recently, queer) literary criticism in fields ranging from Romantic poetry to the contemporary novel, she has studied the cultural and political work accomplished by literature’s formal structures. Her goal has been to mediate between sometimes polarized views of human identity, exploring such questions as: Is gender the core or essence of any human subject, or is gender mutable and socially and culturally constituted? Her current research on narratives about adoption asks what constitutes the “human” in the contexts of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class, as well as gender and sexuality. She is also currently editing a Norton Critical Edition of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” and co-editing a new edition of the Victorian best-seller authored by Queen Victoria.

Homans is a 1974 graduate of Yale College and earned her Ph.D. at the university in 1978. She began her academic career as an assistant professor of English at Yale, and since 1998 she has served as professor of English and of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS). She chaired the WGSS Program from 1993 to 2003 and again in 2015-16 and 2018-19.

Homans is the author of several books, including “Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” “Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876,” and “The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility.” She has contributed numerous articles and book reviews to professional journals.

The Yale professor’s honors include the Keats-Shelley Association Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served as president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and co-chair of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture. In 2014, she was recognized for her teaching at Yale College with the Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize.