Faculty Leaders

Nancy Ruttenburg

Director, Center for the Study of the Novel and The William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature

Nancy Ruttenberg, PhD ’88, has research interests at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.

Professor Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.

Nancy received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008.