Shoshana Milgram Knapp

Shoshana Milgram Knapp is an associate professor in the Department of English. Her main research focus has been nineteenth-century fiction — American, British, French, and Russian — with some attention to related twentieth-century writers. She also works with the Hebrew Bible, film, and non-fictional prose.

In studying the responses of one writer to another, she has published on such subjects as Leo Tolstoy’s reading of George Eliot, George Eliot’s reading of Victor Hugo, Anton Chekhov’s reading of Herbert Spencer, Harold Pinter’s cinematic adaptation of a novel by John Fowles, and the impact of William James and Fyodor Dostoevsky on Ursula K. Le Guin.

Some of Knapp’s research is a kind of literary detection. She wrote the first scholarly articles about the mysterious “Victoria Cross,” whose dates — 1868 to 1952 — and actual name had never before been documented.

Knapp’s long-term study of the life of Ayn Rand up to 1957 (i.e., from her birth in St. Petersburg, Russia, to the publication of her final novel, Atlas Shrugged) involves the examination of texts, the exploration of the relationships between texts, and archival detective work regarding the facts and principles of her public and private life.