Dorothy Z. Baker is Professor of English at the University of Houston and has published four books, America’s Gothic Fiction: The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana (2007), The Soft and Silent Communion: The Spiritual Narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill (2005), Poetics in the Poem (1997), and Mythic Masks in Self-Reflexive Poetry (1986).  She has also published translations of French and Russian poetry and literary theory in addition to numerous essays on American, Canadian, and French literature.  Baker is currently completing a translation of Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s phenomenological study of baroque art, La folie du voir.  Professor Baker is a regular speaker at national and international conferences on the subjects of literary translation, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, spiritual narrative, and literature and the visual arts.

       Dorothy Baker has received multiple awards for teaching excellence at the University of Houston where she offers undergraduate and graduate courses in translation studies, early American literature, and comparative literature.  She has also led graduate seminars in the university’s Moores School of Music and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages.  Her students have won prestigious U.S. and European awards for their work in literary translation, and they are published widely.

       In addition to her teaching and research, Dorothy Baker has served as both undergraduate and graduate director for the Department of English at the University of Houston.

       Dorothy Baker received the B.A. in French and Russian at Wells College, the M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, and the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland.