uzanne Keen's first encounter with this website was when she was student of our Founding Editor-in-Chief, the late George Landow, at Brown University, Rhode Island. As she says herself in a tribute to George, she worked for him on the very start of what was to become the Victorian Web, even to the extent of "making hyperlinks and testing the creations of the software design wizards of the IRIS Intermedia project in the early 1980s."
Since then she has served in a number of academic posts at Yale (1990-1995); Washington and Lee University (1995-2018), where she was Thomas Broadus Professor of English (2005-18); Hamilton College (2018-22); and Scripps College, in Claremont, California from 2022, where she is a member of the Department of English.
Keen is a widely recognised narrative theorist with a particular interest in the workings of literary empathy. She has published many key books and articles in this area, including Empathy and the Novel (2007), and, most recently, Empathy and Reading: Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader (2022). A selection of her books is shown below. She has also found time to be active as an editor, for example co-editing the Oxford University Press journal Contemporary Women's Writing from 2012 until 2018. We are so pleased that she continues to take an interest in our website.
