Christopher Benfey

Mellon Professor of English

Specialization
Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature; poetry, literature, and culture of the American South; connections between the United States and Asia; Emily Dickinson

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 has contributed articles to Travel + Leisure magazine. He is the author of the critically 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 most recent book, on cultural exchange between New England and Japan during the Gilded Age, is The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2003). Benfey's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and Ploughshares.

Benfey's current research concerns New England literary and visual culture during the Gilded Age. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He served for four years as co-director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke.

"Christopher Benfey: An Eye for Bringing Artists and Writers into Focus," Vista, Spring 2000

"Chris Benfey Writes about Painter Edgar Degas' Life in the Nineteenth-Century 'Big Easy'," College Street Journal, January 23, 1998

"Benfey and Remmler to Take the Lead at the Weissman Center," College Street Journal, December 3, 1999