Susanne Wofford, newly-appointed dean of the Gallatin school, is a distinguished scholar of epic poetry and of Renaissance and Early Modern literature. Wofford emerged from a nation-wide search to lead Gallatin, a small, pioneering college that gives students the opportunity to develop programs of study tailored to their needs and ambitions.

Prior to NYU, Susanne Wofford was the Mark Eccles Professor of English and the director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; her areas of scholarly interest are Shakespeare, Spenser, Renaissance and classical epics, comparative European drama, Renaissance fiction and the novella, and narrative and literary theory, among other areas. She came to the University of Wisconsin in 1992 as an associate professor. Prior to that, she was the Charles B.G. Murphy Associate Professor of English at Yale, whereshe began as an assistant professor in 1982. She has been a member of the Bread Loaf School of English since 1987, was a visiting professor of English at Harvard in 1999, and was a visiting faculty member in Princeton’s Program in Theatre and Drama and a Fellow of Princeton’s Council of the Humanities in 2000.

Professor Wofford is the recipient of many prizes and honors. These include: the University of Wisconsin Hilldale Award for Collaborative Research (twice); the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, UW-Madison; the Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English; the A. Whitney Griswold Teaching Award from Yale University (twice); the William Cline Devane Medal for Distinguished Teaching at Yale University; a Mellon Fellowship; a Whiting Fellowship; a Danforth Fellowship; a Marshall Scholarship; and her election to Phi Beta Kappa, among many others.

She is a member of a number of professional organizations, including: the Shakespeare Association of America, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, The Renaissance Society of America, The Spenser Society, and GEMCS: The Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Wofford received her B.A. from Yale College, summa cum laude. She received her B.Phil. in general and comparative literature from Oxford University, and her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale.