Marcia McClintock Folsom
Chair and Professor of Humanities
Office: Activities East 225A
B.A. (English, General Honors), Wellesley College
M.A., University of California at Berkeley
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Marcia McClintock Folsom teaches literature, writing, and the humanities, and is Chair of Humanities and Writing. She is a passionate and committed teacher who has taught at Wheelock for more than forty years. Her "Introduction to the Humanities" includes study of ancient cultures, and her interest in Greek and Biblical archeology has led her to trips in the Mediterranean that inform her teaching in that course. Likewise, her love of Austen's work led her to travel in England and to Austen conferences around the country.
She is the editor of Approaches to Teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1993) and Approaches to Teaching Austen's Emma (2004) published by the Modern Language Association. Her collection, By Women: An Anthology of Literature (1976), was a pioneering book for secondary school English courses.
She has served as chair of Arts and Sciences and as vice president for academic affairs at Wheelock, and in those positions worked on the creation of Wheelock's multi-disciplinary majors. She is known in the Boston area for her lectures at the Radcliffe Seminars, the Teachers as Scholars program, the Jane Austen Society, and the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. Her current research interests are Austen, Shakespeare, and the scholarship of teaching.
- Approaches to Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park. Ed. With John Wiltshire. New York: MLA Press (spring 2014).
- "Power in Mansfield Park: Austen's Study of Domination and Resistance," Persuasions 34 (2013). "The Narrator's Voice and the Sense of Sense and Sensibility,"Persuasions 33 (2012).
- "Inherited and Living Variables: The Choices of Sisters and Brothers in Austen's Mansfield Park," Persuasions 30 OnLine, 2009.
- "The Privilege of My Profession: Austen's Legacy in the Classroom," Persuasions 29 OnLine, 2008.
- "Part of an Englishwoman's Constitution: The Presence of Shakespeare in Mansfield Park." Persuasions 28 (2007).
- "On Mansfield Park: Rethinking the Critical History of Fanny Price," Association Of Literary Critics, Scholars, and Writers, Boston University, March 2011.
- "Pleasure Squared and Squared Again: Rereading Austen's Emma," seminar leader, Teachers as Scholars, two-day Seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 2011.
- "Always Fresh: Reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice," seminar leader, Teachers as Scholars, two-day seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 2010.
- Literature 240: Love and Heroism: The Renaissance in England
- Literature 402: Advanced Studies in Literature: Homer's Odyssey
- Literature 270: The American Renaissance
- Literature 249: Major Author: Jane Austen
- Literature 219: The British Novel of the Nineteenth Century
- Humanities 201: Introduction to the Humanities
- Literature 361: Seminar on Jane Austen
- Humanities 401: Senior Seminar in the Humanities (with history scholar Dr. Jama Lazerow): American History, Literature, and Philosophy in the Antebellum Period
- Literature 362: Shakespeare
- Featured Scholar, "Reading Austen and Watching the Films," WGBH half-hour Promotional Television Broadcast, Spring 2008.
- Lead participant in Modern Language Association's national radio series, "What's the Word," on Austen's Pride and Prejudice, first aired March 2007. http://www.prx.org/pieces/16919-what-s-the-word-pride-and-prejudice