Rate My Professor Katherine Fusco

Katherine Fusco serves as Chair of the Department of English and Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches U.S. film and literature. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University in 2008 and her B.A. from the State University of New York at Geneseo in 2003. Her research interests encompass silent film, classical Hollywood, film theory, U.S. literature, U.S. modernist literature, women's literature, and feminist theory. Fusco has launched a popular film studies minor, directed a large interdisciplinary humanities program, and administered a writing center at the university.

Fusco is the author of three academic books: Hollywood’s Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System (Columbia University Press), co-authored Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday with Nicole Seymour (University of Illinois Press, 2017), and Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity (Routledge, 2016). She has published over a dozen scholarly articles in leading journals, including “Sexing Farina: Our Gang’s Episodes of Racial Childhood” (PMLA, 2018), “Feast your eyes, glut your soul: Lon Chaney, Tod Browning, Disfigurement, and the Limits of Redemptive Affects” (Cinema Journal, 57.4, 2018), “Better Travel through Brand Names: The Couture Grand Tour in Paris is a Woman’s Town and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 62.1, 2016), “Techniques of Justice: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Visualizations and the Problem of Representing the Race” (MELUS, 46.3, 2021), and “Voices from Beyond the Grave: Virtual Tupac’s Live Performance at Coachella” (Camera Obscura, 30.2, 2015). Her scholarship has received major recognition, including the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association for her PMLA article and the 1921 Prize in American Literature for her MELUS piece. In 2025, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to support her biography of Anita Loos, screenwriter and author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Additionally, Fusco has contributed essays to popular outlets such as The Atlantic and Harper’s Bazaar.