Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author of many books, including The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern, Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington, Bloomsbury and France, and Art and Friends (co-authored with Sarah Bird Wright). Among her recent books are Virginia Woolf (Overlook Illustrated Lives), The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter and Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings, as well as Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar and editions of Mallarmé in Prose, Manifesto: A Century of Isms and Surrealist Painters and Poets.

In 2005, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio and published two memoirs—To the Boathouse, and Provencal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France (both out in paper in 2009). Her recent short illustrated biographies include Pablo Picasso, Henry James, and Salvador Dali (with Reaktion Books and Overlook Duckworth). Other books include Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Surprised in Translation (Chicago University Press, also 2006), and, with Nancy Kline, published René Char: Furor and Mystery and Other Poems (2011). Forthcoming books include Strange Arts (tentative title) and The Modern Art Cookbook.

She has been reviewing for the London Review of Books, writes a column (Note from New York) for the Oxford Magazine, and has provided articles for the Publication of the Modern Language Association (of which she is past president), and for The Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, the Yale University Art Gallery (overviews for Picasso and the Allure of Language), and for several art catalogs, for the Art Quarterly, F (the Fashion Magazine in Canada), and given podcasts about translation and about manifestos (for Poetry Magazine). She is also one of the translators of The Collected Poems of Marcel Proust published by Penguin Classics in 2012.

She is frequently invited to lecture on art and literature at our most distinguished universities and institutions (the National Portrait Gallery, the National Academy of Design, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem) and at international conferences. In 2011, she chaired the jury for a thesis in Art History at the Université de Paris. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.