SANDRA GILBERT (1936-2024) taught in the Department of English at UC Davis from 1975 until her retirement in 2005. Before coming to UC Davis, Professor Gilbert taught at California State University at Hayward, St. Mary’s College, and Indiana University. From 1985 to 1989, she was the C. Barnwell Straut Chair of English at Princeton University. Following her retirement from UC Davis, she held a visiting professorship at Cornell University and received honorary degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2004) and Harvard University (2017).
Professor Gilbert was the author of numerous books of autobiography, poetry, and criticism, including Acts of Attention (1972), Wrongful Death: A Memoir (1995), Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (2006), The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity (2014), Judgment Day (2019), and On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of Thinking About Poetry (2021). With her close collaborator Susan Gubar, she co-wrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), a landmark work of feminist criticism, and Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (2021). Gilbert and Gubar co-edited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1979), No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1987-1996), and Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism (2007). Professor Gilbert served as both the Second Vice President and First Vice President of the Modern Language Association (MLA) before being elected President of the MLA in 1996.
Here Professor Gilbert discusses her work as a poet and scholar.