Marcia McClintock Folsom

Chair and Professor of Humanities
Email: mfolsom@wheelock.edu
Phone: 617-879-2192
Office: Longwood 4

Educational Degrees

B.A. (English, General Honors), Wellesley College
M.A., University of California at Berkeley
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley

Marcia McClintock Folsom teaches literature, writing, and the humanities, and is Chair of Humanities and Writing. She is a passionate and committed teacher who has taught at Wheelock for more than forty years. Her "Introduction to the Humanities" includes study of ancient cultures, and her interest in Greek and Biblical archeology has led her to trips in the Mediterranean that inform her teaching in that course. Likewise, her love of Austen's work led her to travel in England and to Austen conferences around the country.

She is the editor of Approaches to Teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1993) and Approaches to Teaching Austen's Emma (2004) published by the Modern Language Association. Her collection, By Women: An Anthology of Literature (1976), was a pioneering book for secondary school English courses.

She has served as chair of Arts and Sciences and as vice president for academic affairs at Wheelock, and in those positions worked on the creation of Wheelock's multi-disciplinary majors. She is known in the Boston area for her lectures at the Radcliffe Seminars, the Teachers as Scholars program, the Jane Austen Society, and the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. Her current research interests are Austen, Shakespeare, and the scholarship of teaching.

Selected Publications

"Inherited and Living Variables: The Choices of Sisters and Brothers in Austen's Mansfield Park," Persuasions 30 OnLine, 2009.

"The Privilege of My Profession: Austen's Legacy in the Classroom," Persuasions 29 OnLine, 2008.

"Part of an Englishwoman's Constitution: The Presence of Shakespeare in Mansfield Park." Persuasions 28 (2007).

Selected Presentations

"On Mansfield Park: Rethinking the Critical History of Fanny Price," Association Of Literary Critics, Scholars, and Writers, Boston University, March 2011.

"Pleasure Squared and Squared Again: Rereading Austen's Emma," seminar leader, Teachers as Scholars, two-day Seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 2011.

"Always Fresh: Reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice," seminar leader, Teachers as Scholars, two-day seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 2010.

Courses Taught

Literature 240: Love and Heroism: The Renaissance in England

Literature 402: Advanced Studies in Literature: The American Renaissance

Literature 270: The American Renaissance

Literature 249: The Complete Author: Jane Austen

Literature 219: The British Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Humanities 201: Introduction to the Humanities

Literature 361: Seminar on Jane Austen

Humanities 401: Senior Seminar in the Humanities (with history scholar Dr. Jama Lazerow): American History, Literature, and Philosophy in the Antebellum Period

Literature 362: Shakespeare

Media Mentions

Featured Scholar, "Reading Austen and Watching the Films," WGBH half-hour Promotional Television Broadcast, Spring 2008.

Lead participant in Modern Language Association's national radio series, "What's the Word," on Austen's Pride and Prejudice, first aired March 2007. http://www.prx.org/pieces/16919-what-s-the-word-pride-and-prejudice

Research Interests and Projects

Book in progress, Approaches to Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park, Ed. With John Wiltshire, Modern Language Association Press, forthcoming.