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Event: Yale University Press Book Featuring SHP Students
Auditorium
Attendance is mandatory for all juniors and seniors.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
- Stanford University
- Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities, Professor of English, and by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
- Education
- Ph.D., Yale University, American Studies
- M. Phil, Yale University, American Studies
- M.A., Yale University, English
- B.A., Yale College, English
- About
- Dr. Fishkin will be discussing her latest book, Jim, with former Prep students whose comments about the character of Jim are featured. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been an important part of the English Department's curriculum for decades.
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- Shelley Fisher Fishkin's principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice. Much of her work has focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past.
- She has served as President of the American Studies Association and of the Mark Twain Circle of America.
- Her most recent book is Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (Yale University Press, 2025), which appeared in Yale's "Black Lives" book series edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacquelyn Goldsby. Kirkus Reviews called it "a powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction's most complex creations." G. Faye Dant, founder of Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, called the book “a captivating narrative about enslavement and racism well beyond the fictional character Jim." And Twain biographer Ron Powers (Mark Twain: A Life) wrote that “Fishkin stands at the pinnacle of Mark Twain studies and criticism. Her astonishing gifts have taken her, and us, far beyond the often-cramped field of enquiries into Mark Twain. She has stood virtually alone in her insistence on race as the thematic foundation of Mark Twain’s literary greatness, producing books, essays, papers and lectures that break open the deceptively bland yet wickedly subtle strategies through which Twain became a defiant truth-teller. . . . Jim, at the end, is nothing short of a call to hope: hope that even in morally chaotic times such as ours, words—written well, read responsibly, and evaluated with bold sophistication—can save us."
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