Susan Stanford Friedman papers (MS.2024.023)

Biographical/Historical Note

Susan Stanford Friedman was Virginia Woolf Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was the former chair of the Department of English, past director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, one of the founding members of the UW-Madison Women's Studies Program in 1975, and the author of four books and over eighty articles and book chapters. Friedman was a trailblazing scholar of literary studies, gender studies, modernism, cultural theory, migration/diaspora studies, planetary literatures, and postcolonial studies.

Friedman's influence on the fields of literary studies and gender studies was significant, her contributions honored over the course of her career with named Professorships, the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies, the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies, and numerous teaching awards. Known for recasting modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon, she revised the scope of modernist critique and opened the practice to more integrated and interdisciplinary study. Friedman brought the Twentieth Century poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) back into critical conversation within the modernist literary landscape and in her groundbreaking work on feminist theory proposed a multiculturalist and geopolitical definition of feminism.

Over the course of her career she lectured around the world, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish. Friedman's more recent work turned towards Oceania and the islands and archipelagos of the Pacific, bringing into sharp focus the ecologically inflected planetarity and politics of women poets as she uncovered both the human and non-human dimensions of modernity across scales large and small, distant and proximate.

Her monograph Sisters of Scheherazade: Religion, Diaspora, and Contemporary Muslim Women's Writing, to be published posthumously by Columbia UP and edited by B. Venkat Mani and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Dean of Humanities and Professor of English at Rutgers University, explores the spectrum of Muslim feminisms, examines the impact of migration and diaspora on gender and Muslim identity, and uses intersectional analysis to see how religion interacts with identity categories like gender, race, class, sexuality, and national origin.

Friedman died of cancer on February 26, 2023, at her home in Madison-Wisconsin, at age 79.

This biography was taken from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's obituary in 2024: https://english.wisc.edu/staff/friedman-susan-stanford/