On ‘Political Disappointment’ and its Origins in a Princeton English Dissertation

Sara Marcus discusses her new book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis and its origins in her Princeton dissertation, along with discussion of her time as a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Princeton. Diana Fuss serves as interlocutor.

Sara Marcus is assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing. She received her Ph.D. in English from Princeton in 2018.

Diana Fuss, the Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English, has taught at Princeton since 1988, after receiving her PhD from Brown University in English and Semiotics. She has taught undergraduate courses on a range of topics in the areas of criticism and theory, 19th and 20th century American and British literature, narrative and poetry, film and media, wilderness and environment, and love and language. Her more specialized graduate offerings have focused on such subjects as Body Parts, Architectural Interiors, The Senses, Contemporary Theory, Freud’s Toolbox, American Elegy, Modern Death, Modern Love, Keywords, Storytelling, and Pedagogy. She has also conducted the graduate pedagogy and dissertation seminars. In 2001 Fuss received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and more recently the University’s Cotsen Fellowship for Distinguished Research and Teaching.