Gary Saul Morson

  • Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities
  • Professor, Russian Literature, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

Gary Saul Morson is Professor of Russian literature and Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Northwestern in 1986. Here he has held endowed chairs for both research and teaching. He teaches the best enrolled course at Northwestern and the best-enrolled course on Russian literature in the U.S.

The author of ten books, he has won prizes for the best book of the year in Comparative Literature and Slavic studies. Since 1995, he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Prof. Morson thinks of himself as a “philosopher without a license.” Two of his books — Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1994) and Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel deal with the nature of time and argue that time is open, there are more possibilities than actualities, and that genuine creativity is real. Prof. Morson has also devoted studies to aphorisms and famous quotations as well as to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers.