Shelley Fisher Fishkin

About

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a distinguished Mark Twain scholar and author, whose 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 written extensively on Mark Twain, producing some of the best scholarship in the long history of Twain studies, and has stood virtually alone in her insistence on race as the thematic foundation of Twain’s literary greatness. Her research and critical work have shed new light on complex characters such as Jim in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' emphasizing themes of enslavement, racism, and moral integrity. Fishkin's work is recognized for being exhaustively researched, eloquently argued, and comprehensive, representing a singular service in national self-knowledge. Her contributions have been praised for their originality, persuasiveness, and their capacity to break open subtle strategies through which Twain became a defiant truth-teller, ultimately serving as a call to hope that words and responsible reading can help navigate morally chaotic times.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Sociology
• Art history
• Transport engineering
• History
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Writing America

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-08-22 · 40 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Winner of the John S. Tuckey 2017Lifetime Achievement Award for Mark Twain Scholarship from The Center for Mark Twain Studies American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature “endows places with meaning.” Yet, as this wide-ranging new book vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American writers’ lives and their art can provide deep insight into what makes their literature truly meaningful. Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation A…

  PublisherDOI

• A Sustainable and Open Access Knowledge Organization Model to Preserve Cultural Heritage and Language Diversity

  Information · 2019-09-28 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper proposes a new collaborative and inclusive model for Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) for sustaining cultural heritage and language diversity. It is based on contributions of end-users as well as scientific and scholarly communities from across borders, languages, nations, continents, and disciplines. It consists in collecting knowledge about all worldwide translations of one original work and sharing that data through a digital and interactive global knowledge map. Collected tran…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Chinese and the Iron Road

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  This landmark volume sheds light on the lives and experiences of the Chinese workers who made up 90% of the workforce that built the Central Pacific Railroad—but who have been little understood and largely invisible in traditional accounts of the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad.

  DOI

• TransLiTex:A Parallel Corpus of Translated Literary Texts

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2018-05-08 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In this paper, we present our ongoing research work to create a massively parallel corpus of translated literary texts which is useful for applications in computational linguistics, translation studies and cross-linguistic corpus studies. Using a crowdsourcing approach, we identified and collected 29 translations of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published in 23 languages including less-resourced languages. We report on the current status of the corpus, with 5 chapter-aligned transl…

  Publisher

• Special Forum Introduction: Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Journal of Transnational American Studies · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Editors' Introduction

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mark Twain

  103 shared

• Linda Morris

  Shirley Ryan AbilityLab

  98 shared

• Susan Harris

  University of Notre Dame

  98 shared

• Lawrence Buell

  98 shared

• Wai Chee Dimock

  98 shared

• Bruce Michelson

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  98 shared

• R.J. Rasmussen

  Elmira College

  98 shared

• Colin Dayan

  98 shared

Education

• Ph.D., English

  Stanford University

  1980

• M.A., English

  Stanford University

  1976

• B.A., English

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1973

Awards & honors

• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan
• Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University…
• Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (…
• London Book Festival Best Book Award in the general nonficti…

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