Shapiro, Ann R. 1937- (Emily Greenspan)

PERSONAL:

Born February 28, 1937, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Murray (a lawyer) and Jeanette Rabinowitz; married Donald Shapiro, February 2, 1958 (divorced, 1986); partner of Paul Ehrlich (in broadcast news); children: (with Shapiro) Rona, Emma Morgan, Edward. Ethnicity: "Jewish American." Education: Harvard University, A.B. (cum laude), 1958, M.A.T., 1960; New York University, Ph.D., 1985. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Jewish. Hobbies and other interests: Theater, tennis, ballet, reading.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Department of English, State University of New York at Farmingdale, Framingdale, NY 11735; fax: 212-831-3308. E-mail—shapirar@aol.com.

CAREER:

Rider College, Lawrenceville, NJ, instructor in English, 1962-65; Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY, instructor in English, 1966-67; State University of New York at Farmingdale, Farmingdale, distinguished teaching professor of English and humanities, 1974—, director of Writing across the Curriculum, 1987-93, and Writing in the Disciplines, 2002—. Harvard University, founding member of Committee for the Equality of Women; guest lecturer at educational institutions, including Radcliffe College, Columbia University, Jewish Theological Seminary, and University of Connecticut.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America (and its Women's Caucus), Association for Jewish Studies, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, National Council for Research on Women.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow of Salzburg Seminars, 1988; grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1990 and 1994; Judaica Reference Book Award, Association of Jewish Libraries, 1996, for Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook.

WRITINGS:

Unlikely Heroines: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Woman Question, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1987.

(Editor) Jewish-American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1994.

Contributor to books, including coauthor of introduction, Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor, New American Library (New York, NY), 1986; and Smashing the Idols, edited by Gary Eisenberg, Jason Aronson (New York, NY), 1988; and Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History, edited by Laurel Ulrich, Palgrave/Macmillan (New York, NY), 2004. Contributor of articles and reviews to academic journals, including Radical Teacher, Shofar, Studies in American Jewish Literature, MultiCultural Review, Harvard Magazine, and Signs.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ann R. Shapiro once told CA: "Although most of my writing has been academic, everything I have written has grown out of very personal concerns. I became interested in nineteenth-century American women writers, the subject of Unlikely Heroines: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Woman Question, because they, like I, were told that women occupied a separate sphere, circumscribed by home and children. (The 1950s were more comparable to the 1850s for middle-class women than to any other historic period before or since.) I wrote about Jewish American women writers at a time when Jewish American literature still omitted most women. Now I am researching Edna Ferber, a woman who overcame both anti-Semitism and misogyny to be hailed by many as the foremost writer of her day."