Suzanne Raitt
Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences; Chancellor Professor of English
William & Mary

Suzanne Raitt is Dean of Arts & Sciences, and Chancellor Professor of English at William & Mary. She received a BA in English at Jesus College, Cambridge and an MA in English at Yale University, and then returned to Cambridge to do a PhD in English. She taught at the University of London for six years before moving to the University of Michigan, where she stayed for another five years. She came to William & Mary in 2000.

Her research interests include British modernist women writers, especially biography; history and theory of sexuality; psychoanalytic theory; nineteenth and twentieth century British literature; and women's studies.

Her books include May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford, 2000), Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V.Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford, 1993), and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (St Martin's, 1990). She also co-edited a collection of essays with Trudi Tate called Women's Fiction and the Great War (Oxford, 1997), and in 1995 she published an edited collection of essays on lesbian criticism, Volcanoes and Pearl Divers (Onlywomen Press). Editions include the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (co-edited with Ian Blyth) in 2018, the Norton Critical Edition of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room in 2007, Katherine Mansfield's Something Childish and Other Stories for Penguin in 1996, and Virginia Woolf's Night and Day for Oxford World's Classics in 1992. She has published numerous essays and articles in journals including Modernism/modernity and History Workshop Journal, and for twelve years she was on the editorial collective of Feminist Studies.

Most recently she's been working on a book about twin culture, exploring the different stories that are told about them (for example, the evil twin, the lost twin) and trying to find out why twins are so fascinating to so many people.

Her teaching interests include nineteenth and twentieth century British literature, Virginia Woolf, psychoanalytic and cultural theory, and introductory women's studies. She was one of the early adopters of hybrid learning at William & Mary. In Fall 2015, she taught a semester program, "Social Movements in the Nation's Capital," at the William & Mary in DC campus with colleague Heather Macdonald.