Mary Mussman is a researcher, educator, and poet.
A Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Mary researches literary histories of gender variance and queer sexuality in Britain and France, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At Berkeley, Mary has designed and taught undergraduate literature courses that engage trans studies, queer theory, and feminist thought. With the support of a Graduate Diversity Grant, they led a graduate student community-building workshop in the department of Comparative Literature in fall 2023. As a program associate at the Townsend Center for the Humanities from 2021–2023, Mary oversaw the “Bear’s-Eye View” blog and the Course Threads certificate program, and coordinated the Honors Thesis Workshop.
Mary has published poetry in The White Review, Fieldnotes, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Their writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Gatewood Prize.
Mary holds an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Berkeley (2020) and a B.A. in Literature from Yale (2015). They have also studied at l’École Normale Supérieure de Paris and l’Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV).