Chris Foss

Chris Foss

Chris Foss specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, with a secondary expertise in disability studies.  As his over 30 publications and over 50 conference papers suggest, his intellectual interests are wide-ranging.  He has published on comics, drama, fiction, film, literary theory, nonfiction, pedagogy, and poetry—including on writers as diverse as Hélène Cixous, Jay Dolmage, Toru Dutt, Ford Madox Ford, Temple Grandin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keiko Tobe, and Oscar Wilde.  Most notably, he served as lead editor for the essay collection Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, published by Palgrave in 2016, and his new book The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, will be available in April 2025 by the University of Virginia Press. His courses include British Romantic Literature, British Romantic Women Poets, British Victorian Literature, Disability and Literature, and the (in)famous Oscar Wilde seminar!

B.A., Concordia College (Moorhead, MN); M.A., Northeastern University; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison. UMW Directory Profile.