Patricia Vigderman came to Kenyon in 1989. She has also taught at Tufts University and Harvard University. She has taught courses in Victorian literature, autobiographical writing, fiction and nonfiction creative writing courses, film and literature, and film. Her film courses emphasize the artifice that goes into the pleasures of film and the uses of melodrama. Her writing courses explore the pleasures and perils of genre-crossing. She is the author of The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a long meditation on the nineteenth-century Boston art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and the problems of perceiving the past. Her creative nonfiction and essays on art have appeared in Raritan, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Many of these are in her new essay collection, Possibility: Essays Against Despair. She is currently working on a book about the imagined life of classical art, to be called The Real Life of the Parthenon.

Education

Ph.D. Tufts University
M.A. Tufts University
B.A. Vassar College

Selected Publications

Possibility: Essays Against Despair, Sarabande Books, 2013.

The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Sarabande Books, 2007

"Monkey Mind" (on creative digression), Seneca Review, 2007

"The Two-Part History of a Time-Based Art" (on film), Southwest Review, Spring 2005

"The Task of the Translator," (on being present with nature and art), Kenyon Review, Fall 2004

"Boxes in Texas" (on the minimalist art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas), Raritan, Spring 2003

"Tapping Back " (on the trouble of reading Proust), Georgia Review, Spring 2003

Courses Taught

ENGL 203 Creative Writing: Fiction and Other Hybrid Forms
ENGL 219 Film as Text
ENGL 103 Film and Literature