Professor Michèle Mendelssohn

Michèle Mendelssohn is Professor of English and American Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Oxford University. Her research spans the late 19th century to the present day and addresses questions of aesthetics, race, gender, sexuality and cultural politics in British, American and African American literature. She has written, co-edited and introduced 7 books. Her most recent book, Making Oscar Wilde, was selected as a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement and The Advocate. It was a semi-finalist for the PEN America Biography Prize, a finalist for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Prize, and a finalist for the LGBTQ Polari Prize. She is currently writing a book about the true story of one of the first woman-led expeditions to the Arctic. With Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité), she is co-PI on POLAR X, a research collaboration that centres on women’s narratives of polar encounters, extractivism and exploration from the 19th century to the present.