Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography, Dartmouth College
Honorary Visiting Professor, University of Exeter
Ph.D., Stanford University
204 Sanborn House
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Gretchen.H.Gerzina@Dartmouth.EDU
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina teaches courses on the novel, biography, Bloomsbury and black literature of Britain and America.
She is the author or editor of seven books. Carrington: A Life (about the Bloomsbury figure Dora Carrington, whose life was made into a film starring Emma Thompson); Black London (about the black population of eighteenth-century Britain), a New York Times “notable book of the year”; Frances Hodgson Burnett: The unexpected Life of the Author of 'The Secret Garden', and editor of the book Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. In January 2006 her Norton Critical Edition of The Secret Garden was published; the Norton Annotated Secret Garden, a lavishly illustrated coffee table version of the classic, appeared in October 2007.
Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend, appeared in hardcover in 2008 with Amistad/HarperCollins; the paperback edition published in 2009. It is the story of two former slaves, Abijah Prince and Lucy Terry Prince, in colonial Massachusetts and Vermont, who became landowners and public figures, successfully defending themselves in court. Lucy Terry Prince is considered to be the first African American poet. Articles and reviews on Professor Gerzina and her work have appeared in The New York Times; the Boston Globe; the Washington Post; USA Today and many British newspapers. She has appeared frequently as a radio guest in both England and America, in British television documentaries, and on American television programs such as The Tavis Smiley Show. Her commentaries have aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and on Vermont Public Radio.
As the host the nationally-syndicated radio program “The Book Show,” she interviews authors on their recent books. Guests have included Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Kazuo Ishiguro, A.S. Byatt, Michael Eric Dyson, Salman Rushdie, Valerie Martin, and Michael Ondaatje.
Professor Gerzina has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Great Britain. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter in Devon, England, and has been selected by the Rhodes Trust and Oxford University to be the 2009/10 George Eastman Visiting Professor to Oxford University, and fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
-Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend, HarperCollins, January 2008.
-The Annotated Secret Garden, W.W. Norton, forthcoming, October 2007.
A fully-annotated edition of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, containing 120 illustrations.
-Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden, Rutgers University Press (US) and Chatto & Windus (UK), 2004
-Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, Rutgers University Press, 2003
-Carrington: A Life, John Norton (UK) and John Murray (USA), 1989
