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Maud Casey

Side headshot of Professor Maud Casey

Professor, English

3103 Tawes Hall
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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.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:

“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.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:
Mystery is not often discussed—apart from the genre—because, as Maud Casey says, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction?

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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.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:
When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he’s left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.

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Genealogy

A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:

Meet 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.

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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.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:
Maud Casey -- author of The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book -- explores how we survive modern crises of loss and love through the lives of emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while reaching toward life. These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make drastic an unforgettable collection.

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The 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.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:
Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who once appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend. She also becomes a "mystery shopper" for a temp agency, posing as a variety of potential tenants for newly built suburban communities to assess their exclusive services. Enchanted by the possibilities of disguise, Isabelle spins a web of lies that keeps the world at a distance until she unearths long-kept secrets that force her to rethink everything she thought she knew.

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Service & Outreach

Guggenheim Fellowship

University of Maryland English Professor Maud Casey is a recipient of a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:
Funding Agency: Guggenheim
Casey’s scholarship focuses on the creative arts through fiction writing.

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DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship

D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship.

English

Author/Lead: Maud Casey
Dates:
2008-09