The Scientist Meets the Monster: From Frankenstein to Einstein

Sue Weaver Schopf is Distinguished Service Lecturer in Extension at Harvard University. She has recently retired from the position of associate dean and director of the Master of Liberal Arts Program at the Harvard Extension School, where she also served for nearly thirty years as research advisor in the humanities. She came to Harvard as an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities in 1980, after completing a PhD in English at Vanderbilt University. She teaches writing-intensive literature courses on topics as far ranging as English romantic poetry, Victorian poetry and nonfictional prose, modern poetry, literary criticism and theory, Western drama, Milton and Paradise Lost, Irish literature, Orientalism in British literature and visual culture, the vampire in literature and film, and the post-apocalyptic novel and film. She has received post-doctoral fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation; and is a winner of the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Prize, the Michael Shinagel Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Student Success, and the Dean's Distinguished Service Award. As faculty lecturer on more than thirty Harvard Alumni Association travel-study programs, she has spoken on a variety of literary and art-historical topics throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, Ireland, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, and Egypt. Strongly committed to the idea that walking in the footsteps of writers and artists is important to understanding their work, Schopf has created a number of spring-break tours for her literature students in England, Ireland, Greece, Egypt, and France. She has published scholarly articles on various nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary topics and is a former trustee of the Salem Athenaeum, which recently honored her with the Edward Augustus Holyoke Award for Exemplary Service.