Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities
Professor of English, and by courtesy, of African and African American Studies

See Full Bio here: https://english.stanford.edu/people/shelley-fisher-fishkin

Ph.D., Yale University, American Studies
M.A., Yale University, English
B.A., Yale College, English

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice. Much of her work has focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. 

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor, co-author,  or co-editor of fifty books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays, columns, and reviews. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in China, Turkey, Japan, and Korea.

Her most recent book is Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (Yale University Press, 2025),  which appeared in Yale's "Black Lives" book series edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacquelyn Goldsby. Kirkus Reviews called  it "a powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction's most complex creations." G. Faye Dant, founder of Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, called the book “a captivating narrative about enslavement and racism well beyond the fictional character Jim." Amd Twain biographer Ron Powers (Mark Twain: A Life) wrote that  “Fishkin stands at the pinnacle of Mark Twain studies and criticism. Her astonishing gifts have taken her, and us, far beyond the often-cramped field of enquiries into Mark Twain. She has stood virtually alone in her insistence on race as the thematic foundation of Mark Twain’s literary greatness, producing books, essays, papers and lectures that break open the deceptively bland yet wickedly subtle strategies through which Twain became a defiant truth-teller. . . . Jim, at the end, is nothing short of a call to hope: hope that even in morally chaotic times such as ours, words—written well, read responsibly, and evaluated with bold sophistication—can save us." 

Her other books include  Writing America: Literary from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (named runner-up for the best book award in the general nonfiction category, London Book Festival, 2015) (Rutgers University Press, 2015; paperback, 2017), a book that Junot Díaz called "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States." She is also the author of: From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985); Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book " by Choice) (Oxford, 1993); Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford, 1997);  and Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).  She is the editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009) - an edition that Modern Language Review called "an act of genius." She is also editor of the Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain (Oxford, 2002), "Is He Dead? " A New Comedy by Mark Twain (University of California, 2003), Mark Twain's Book of Animals (University of California Press, 2009), and The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work (Library of America, 2010).

She helped guide Is He Dead?, a neglected play by Mark Twain that she uncovered in the archives, to Broadway.  She was a producer of Is He Dead?, adapted by David Ives, which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award. Since it closed on Broadway, it has had 491 productions in 48 states and Australia, Canada, China, Romania, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.

She is the co-editor of The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Stanford University Press, 2019), as well as Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford, 1994); People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin, 1996); The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America (3 vols., M.E. Sharpe, 1997);  'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar (Random House, 2005), Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition (Prentice-Hall, 2006), Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition (Prentice-Hall, 2011), a special issue of Arizona Quarterly on Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910 (2005);and a special issue of African American Review devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's "Race and American Culture " book series with Arnold Rampersad.

She has served as President of the American Studies Association and of the Mark Twain Circle of America, and has given keynote talks at conferences in Basel, Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jiangmen, Kolkata,  Kunming, Kyoto,  La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Vorarlberg, and across the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and twice on the front page of the New York Times Arts section.

In 2023, she was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for “Lifetime Achievement And Outstanding Contribution to American Studies” by the American Studies Association.

In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for  international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world."

In 2022, she was awarded the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for “Scholarly Innovation and Creativity” by the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2017, she was awarded the John S. Tuckey lifetime achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (the first woman to receive this award, which was established in 1991, and is given every four years). The award announcement recognized her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies."

The Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and (by courtesy) Professor of African and African American Studies  at Stanford, served as Director of Stanford's American Studies Program from 2003 to 2024. In 2009 she co-founded the online, open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Transnational American Studies, and is   co-founder and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project  with Gordon H. Chang, the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Stanford. (For her publications and exibits related to this project, go to her Stanford website).

She is  completing a book about how Hal Holbrook made Mark Twain a social critic for our time.