Mary Ellen Titus

Mary Titus is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Womens Studies. Her scholarship is primarily on 19th and early 20th century American literature, especially literature of the American South. She is interested in the relationships between literary texts and popular culture and has published essays on such topics as slave narratives, food and race, and myths of Southern womanhood.

On her mother's side, Mary descends from Polish Jews who immigrated to Michigan just before the Civil War. Almost all of the descendents of her ancestors who remained in Poland died in the Holocaust. On her fathers side, she descends from English Quakers who settled on Long Island around 1700. Mary grew up in Norwich, Vermont and Schenectady, New York; her mother was a homemaker, her father a physics professor. She left high school after 11th grade, but received a diploma after completing a year at Schenectady County Community College. She then enrolled at the State University of New York, Fredonia, planning to major in ceramics.

A course titled Introduction to Poetry changed her direction, and she transferred to Skidmore College, where she graduated summa cum laude. Mary received a PhD. in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill the same year she married Chris Bashor under the care of the Washington D.C. meeting of the Religious Society of Friends(Quaker). She has two daughters, ages 6 and 8. Mary serves the community on the Northfield Heritage Preservation Commission and as a board member for a nonprofit organization that sponsors ENABL (Education Now and Babies Later). She is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies.

"The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or character in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us."

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition