Timea Széll

Senior Lecturer in English

Department

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, English, Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Office

423 Barnard Hall

Contact

Timea Széll joined the faculty in 1979, four years after she graduated from the College in 1975. She has been serving as the Director of the Creative Writing Program since 2000. In addition to the Department of English, Dr. Széll is affiliated with Barnard's Medieval and Renaissance Program and when possible teaches the senior research seminar in gender studies. She teaches a range of courses, including Fiction and Personal Narrative, Critical Writing, the English Colloquium, and senior seminar. She also teaches in the First-Year Seminar Program.  

Her current pedagogical and writerly interests include human-animal studies, Hungarian literature, translation, and creative nonfiction. Dr. Széll's fiction has been published in The Southern Review and a number of literary journals.

  • Ph.D., SUNY, Stony Brook
  • M.A., Columbia University
  • A.B., Barnard College

  • Medieval literature and culture
  • Fiction writing

"Not Erotic," Animal Companions Animal Doctors, Animal People: Poems Essays, and Stories, edited by Hilde Weisert and Elizabeth Arnold Stones (Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, 2012), 103-106. (Invited contribution)

"Teaching Unstable Animal Identities in Medieval Narrative," English Language Notes, 47-1. Spring/Summer 2009, 147-157.

"Dwarf Armies," Western Humanities Review 47 (Winter 1993).

"From Woe to Weal and Weal to Woe: Notes on the Structure of The Book of Margery Kempe," in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. S. J. McEntire (New York: Garland Press, 1992).

Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, co-edited with R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Cornell, 1991).

"Roman Business," Southern Review 23 (October 1987).

"The First Portrait," Southern Review 20 (Issue 2, 1987).

In The News

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and alumna will oversee the creative writing program to help guide students on their journeys as writers. 

April 19, 2022