Suzanne Verderber

I am a professor, scholar, and writer with a broad range of interests that do not comfortably reside within the confines of traditional academic disciplines. My teaching, research, and writing involves literature and literary theory, cinema, philosophy, art and art history, and religion. I specialize in medieval France; modernist literature; mass culture; and psychoanalytic theory by Freud and Lacan and how it connects to theories and philosophies by Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari and others to obtain a greater understanding how subjects are produced both in the Middle Ages and in our present moment of crisis. What are the possibilities for being human within the constraints imposed upon us by the economy, technology, politics, history, and climate? How does history help us to understand the specificity of our own situation as humans?

I am also an experienced editor and translator from French to English. My goal is to keep teaching and producing scholarship while branching out to new genres, including fiction and journalism.

I am also experienced in curriculum development, course design, and outcomes assessment. My great joy at Pratt is to watch how scholarship and research enhances the creativity of my students.

My current motto is that "it is better to be smart than sound smart."