Mary Mussman is a researcher, educator, and poet living in New York. They research literary histories of gender variance and queer sexuality in Britain and France, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mary holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Their first book project draws on linguistic anthropology and pragmatic philosophy to trace how English and French literary cultures turned certain forms of interior somatic experience into sociocultural indexes of modern queer sexuality. Mary is also developing new work on the place of literary history in trans studies.
Mary is currently a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where they teach courses on gender and sexuality in the Undergraduate Writing Program. They have previously taught at Deep Springs College and UC Berkeley.
