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.

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)

News Links:

"Boston Globe Reviews New Book by Benfey," Boston Globe, April 20, 2008

"Republican Reviews Benfey's Latest," Springfield Republican, April 13, 2008

America Audacity: Literary Essays North and South (The University of Michigan Press)

"MHC's Benfey Reviews Woodward Novel," New York Times Book Review, March 30, 2008

More news links...