Lise Sanders 90F

Professor of English Literature & Cultural Studies
Lise Sanders
Contact Lise

Mail Code CS
Lise Sanders 90F
Adele Simmons Hall 103
413.559.5650

On sabbatical fall 2023 and leave of absence spring 2024.


Lise Sanders 90F received her B.A. in literature from Hampshire College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English language and Literature from the University of Chicago.

Sanders works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, print media and periodical culture, fashion studies, film studies, early film history, feminist theory, women’s history, and gender studies.

Her current book project, Working Women and Popular Culture in Britain, 1910s-1930s: Redressing the Romance, focuses on early twentieth-century magazines for girls and young women, intermedial fictions by Elinor Glyn and E.M. Hull, and writings by and about working-class women addressing women’s sexual and political agency in the interwar period.

Her books include Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 (Ohio State University Press, 2006); Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female, co-authored with Pamela K. Stone (Routledge, 2020); Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, co-edited with Amy Bingaman and Rebecca Zorach (Routledge, 2002); and a critical edition of Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s 1875 novel Janet Doncaster (Victorian Secrets, 2017). With Susanne Schmid, she co-edited a collection of primary sources on shops and department stores entitled Temples of Luxury (Routledge, 2024). She has co-edited special journal issues on fashion with Ilya Parkins (The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and Feminist Theory) and on women’s writing and social/political activism with Carey Snyder (Women: A Cultural Review). Her articles on Victorian feminism, literature, and early cinema have appeared in Early Popular Visual Culture, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Women’s History Review, and several edited collections.

Sanders has taught at Amherst and Smith College and has advised master’s and doctoral students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She serves on the board of directors of The Massachusetts Review and is a member of the Feminist Theory editorial collective.