Lisa Zunshine (born 24 August 1968) is an American literary scholar, who publishes in British literature, comparative literature, film/media studies, and cognitive literary theory. She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012),The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford UP, 2015), and The Secret Life of Literature (MIT Press, 2022).
Early life and education Zunshine came to the United States as a refugee, from Latvia, when she was twenty-one, and became a U.S. citizen in 1998. She graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000.
Career She is a retired professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and was a Guggenheim fellow in 2007.
Books Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism: Narrative Analysis for Social Change, with Simone Drake, Jim Phelan, and Robyn Warhol. 2024 The Secret Life of Literature. 2022 Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture. 2012 The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. 2015 Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden. Co-edited with Jayne Lewis. 2013 Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. 2010 Acting Theory and the English Stage. 2008 Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative. 2008 Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. 2006 Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Co-edited with Jocelyn Harris. 2006 Philanthropy and Fiction. 2006 Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England. 2005 Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries. 1999
References
External links Two Professors Named Guggenheim Fellows "Why Fiction Does it Better" The Chronicle of Higher Education "Culture of Greedy Mind Readers" Huffington Post Homepage