Hilary Schor

Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Law
Last Updated: September 12, 2023

Hilary Schor is a professor of English and gender studies at USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, with joint appointments in the department of comparative literature and the law school. She also is a member and past director of the USC Center for Law, History and Culture. Her scholarship focuses on narrative theory; law, property and the nature of subjectivity in literature; and popular culture and film.

Schor has taught at USC since 1986. She is an active faculty participant in the UC Dickens Project, where she regularly leads graduate seminars and organizes conferences on such topics as “Victorian Soundings,” “Victoria Redressed: Feminism and Nineteenth-Century Studies,” and “Victorian Terror.” Her books include Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1992) and Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge, 1999). She also has written essays in companions to numerous books on Dickens, Jane Austen, Victorian novels and Victorian literature and culture. Her current research centers on women and realism.

She received her BA in British and American literature from Scripps College and her MA and PhD from Stanford University, where she specialized in Victorian literature and culture, drawing on work in intellectual history, feminist studies and the history of the novel. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a 2002 Zumberge Faculty Research Fellowship from USC; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship; and a Graves Foundation Fellowship.