"Her thoughtful and sustained engagement with Emily Brontė's poetry has nothing of the brittle "argument" of much contemporary critical discourse; in its determined focus on the elemental conditions of human existence and its scrupulous attention to language, Last Things provides an example of what a reinvigorated critical humanism might look like." - Joe Phelan, from a review of Last Things in TLS (2007).

"Although I no longer read Wuthering Heights as a love story, or at least not as the kind of love story and marriage plot it has been taken to be, Emily Brontė's novel always felt risky and fierce. The poems were less accessible, and the ones I found first in anthologies seemed to have fallen out of some context that was unfamiliar to me. Recovering that context was the project of the edition of the complete poems that I edited for Penguin. I was sure from the start that the important context for the poems wasn't the Gondal narrative. Last Things tries to come to terms with all that supported, enabled, and endangered Emily's poems." -Janet Gezari, from a 2007 online interview with Mark Thwaite http://www.readysteadybook.com

• The English novel since Defoe
• Victorian culture, poetry, and fiction
• Contemporary fictions

Janet Gezari graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University and received her M. Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her writing has focused on the novels of the Brontės, the poetry of Emily Brontė, Victorian and modern novels, contemporary fiction in English, and Bob Dylan.

She regularly teaches courses on the history of the English novel since Defoe, contemporary fiction in English and in translation, and Dylan (with Prof. Charles Hartman). She was an early supporter of Women's Studies at the college and served as Acting Director of the program. She was Acting Director of Gender and Women Studies when the Fuller-Maathai chair was endowed and named. She has twice co-directed (with Prof. Emeritus Ed Brodkin) the college's SATA program in Mysore, India, where she had the chance to teach English colonial novels and Anglophone Indian postcolonial novels.

Gezari is the editor of Emily Brontė: The Complete Poems (Penguin Press, 1991) and the author of Charlotte Brontė and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1993 and jointly awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy in 1994. Her book on Emily Brontė, Last Things: Emily Brontė's Poems, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. She has re-edited Charlotte Brontė's Shirley in the Oxford World Classics series and written a new introduction for The Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontė (Oxford University Press, 2010).

She is currently working on an annotated edition of Wuthering Heights (forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2012) and a book on late style in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Coetzee, Bob Dylan, and Philip Roth.

In 2010, Gezari was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where she was working on late style. In 1997, she was given the Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Chair and received the Nancy Batson Nisbet Rash Research Scholar Award.

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