Christopher Benfey

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Christopher Benfey

Chris Benfey Professor of English
210 Shattuck Hall
(413) 538-2532
office hours: M 10:00-12:00 & by appt.
cbenfey@mtholyoke.edu

Education
A.B. Guilford College
Ph.D. Harvard University

Christopher Benfey has emerged over the past decade as a prolific critic, essayist, and author, whose reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement have established him as a distinguished contemporary arbiter of modern and late twentieth-century American literature.

Benfey's interests and scholarship transcend academic disciplines, however -- ranging from art and literature to social history. In addition to his work on literary figures and movements, Benfey, who is well known as an Emily Dickinson scholar, has served as an art critic for the online magazine Slate and is the author of the criticaly acclaimed Degas in New Orleans (1997), in which he explores little-known aspects of the life and work of the nineteenth-century French Impressionist painter. The book was named one of the ten most important books of 1997 by the Chicago Tribune. Benfey is also the author of The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992) and Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others (1984). His poems have appeared in the Paris Review and Ploughshares.

Cultural exchange between New England and Japan during the Gilded Age is the topic of Benfey's current research. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Selected Publications
A Summer of Hummingbirds (Penguin 2008)
The Great Wave (Random House 2003)
Degas in New Orleans (Knopf 1997)
The Double Life of Stephen Crane (Knopf 1992)
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others (UMass 1984)

Teaching Schedule 2007-2008
English 240f American Literature I
English 353f Literary Biography
English 200s Introduction to the Study of Literature