Sue Weaver Schopf

Sue Weaver Schopf is associate dean for the Master of Liberal Arts program at the Harvard Extension School and a lecturer in Extension. She came to Harvard as an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in the humanities in the department of English and American literature and language in 1980, after completing a PhD in English at Vanderbilt University. She first taught in Extension in 1982, and has been associated with the ALM program since 1986, serving first as research advisor in the humanities, then senior research advisor, and finally as director. In addition to advising graduate students in the humanities on their thesis projects, 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, and Orientalism in British literature and visual culture. She has received post-doctoral fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a winner of the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Prize. In 2006, she was honored for 25 years of teaching in the Extension School. As faculty lecturer on more than 30 Harvard Alumni Association travel-study programs, she has spoken on a variety of literary and art-historical topics throughout England, 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, and Egypt. She has published scholarly articles on various nineteenth-century literary topics and serves as a trustee of the Salem Athenaeum, chairing its education committee.