Maud Casey

Research Expertise
Creative Writing
Maud Casey is the author of four novels, The Shape of Things to Come, Genealogy, The Man Who Walked Away, City of Incurable Women; a collection of stories, Drastic; and a book of nonfiction,The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize, a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and numerous international fellowships including, most recently a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship. Her essays and stories have appeared in A Public Space, The American Scholar, Literary Imagination, The New York Times, and The Threepenny Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Publications
City of Incurable Women
In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored.
Author/Lead: Maud Casey“City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through
“Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.
The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions
The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction.
Author/Lead: Maud CaseyRead More about The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions
The Man Who Walked Away: A Novel
In a trance-like state, Albert walks—from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia—all over Europe.
Author/Lead: Maud CaseyGenealogy
A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption.
Author/Lead: Maud CaseyMeet the Hennarts: Samantha Hennart, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a nineteenth-century Belgian mystic with stigmata; their son, Ryan, a mediocre rock musician; and their eighteen-year old daughter, Marguerite, who is quetly losing her mind. A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption. An Editor's Choice selection for the New York Times Book Review.
Drastic
Meet the college graduate working in a whole body-donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter.
Author/Lead: Maud CaseyThe Shape of Things to Come
Isabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a "grown-up" life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company.
Author/Lead: Maud CaseyService & Outreach
Guggenheim Fellowship
University of Maryland English Professor Maud Casey is a recipient of a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Author/Lead: Maud CaseyFunding Agency: Guggenheim