Professor Susanna Lee is an internationally recognized specialist in the nineteenth-century French novel and twentieth-century crime fiction. Lee, who serves as chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies, has a variety of research interests, including popular culture, literary theory and law and humanities. 

Lee’s first book, A World Abandoned by God, examined lived experiences of the secular world in nineteenth-century French and Russian narrative. She then wrote two books on hard-boiled detective fiction, a genre that emphasizes individualism and realism. Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority studied French and American detectives as nationally specific culture heroes and models of spiritual authority. In Detectives in the Shadows, a “feisty alternative view of American history as seen through the lens of hard-boiled detective fiction,” Lee tells the story of the American twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the nation’s ever-evolving love affair with the hard-boiled detective. True to her roots in the French canon, she also edited the Norton Critical Editions of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Proust’s Swann’s Way.

Now in her second year as convener of Georgetown’s Faculty of Literatures, Cultures, and Language Studies, Lee continues to research the limits and possibilities of individual human agency. Most recently, she has co-edited, with Austin Sarat, Regulating the Body, forthcoming in 2025, which analyzes the practices and discourses used to constrain bodily autonomy in American law. She is currently at work on a new book project, a cultural history of alcoholism in France.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). Yes, it is long, but you will thank me — once you have read Proust, you have a friend for life. This novel has everything — incomparably beautiful writing, complicated and obsessive and memorable characters and a deep dive into human nature of all kinds. And it is funny. You can’t beat Proust when it comes to creating and making fun of characters who try too hard. I first came to Proust in graduate school fearing it would be a daunting slog, but not at all, he is amazing. 

What is a book that you revisit every year?

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, because every sentence is like a celebration of what words can do. He took seven years to write it and it is just one Easter egg after another. This is one of the books that made me decide to become a 19ièmiste (to specialize in the 19th century) because of what Flaubert does with language and the way the characters are relatable and repulsive at the same time, so bold and so clueless.

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

Both the books named above, also Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi and Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson. The first course I ever designed was an American literature course called “Hardboiled Crime Fiction;” we started with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and, while preparing that course, I discovered Jim Thompson. He looked like a patrician gentleman but the writing is some of the most unhinged material you’ll ever see, and it’s fascinating to see total moral rot combined with lively and poetic writing. Oddly enough, Pop. 1280 was made into a French movie, called Coup de Torchon, which the director chose to set in French-occupied West Africa, and there is a lot to say about that.  

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. So beautiful and moving. It’s about community and empathy and quiet, important lives, how we can save each other. To me it reads delicately, like lace filigree, even though all of human life is there, and when it’s over you just sit and marvel at what you just read.

What is the perfect book for the beach?

This is a tough one because I’m from Southern California and if we’re at the beach we’re in the water! But to answer the question — anything by English mystery writer Ruth Rendell, A Judgment in Stone or The Bridesmaid are great and both were made into French movies. Also French mystery writer Fred Vargas or American mystery writer Kellye Garrett. Ruth Rendell was prolific and incredible, she also wrote psychological thrillers under the name of Barbara Vine. Fred Vargas in some ways rejuvenated French crime fiction, and she has been writing amazing novels since the 1990s — email me for recommendations! Kellye Garrett’s Hollywood Homicide was so much fun to read, and cheered me during the pandemic — her latest is Missing White Woman. 

Photography by Oxana Ware (C’07, G’09).

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