For a complete and current CV, please email lisa[dot]mendelman[at]menlo[dot]edu.
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS
Associate Professor of English & Digital Humanities, Menlo College, 2022-
Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, 2026-
Assistant Professor of English & Digital Humanities, Menlo College, 2016-2022
Instructor, Continuing Studies, Stanford University, Summer 2019
Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles Department of English, 2015-16
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
M.A. in English, Stanford University, 2007
B.A. in English, Stanford University, 2004
• Interdisciplinary Honors in Feminist Studies; Phi Beta Kappa
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Health humanities; digital humanities; American literature since 1865; transnational modernisms; affect studies; gender studies; critical race studies; critical disability studies; literature and science; visual and material culture.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Book
1. Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America, Oxford University Press, 2019. 256 pages.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
19. Mendelman, Lisa, Russell C. Dale, Katherine Mackenzie, J. Michael Bostwick, Ellen R. Wald, Terence Sanger, Kate Miles, Sarah Kendell, Mark S. Pasternack, and Jennifer Frankovich. “Perspectives on Psychiatric Features of Sydenham Chorea.” Pediatrics, published online: September 16, 2026, e2026076410, doi: 10.1542/peds.2026-076410.
18. Algee-Hewitt, Mark*, Lisa Mendelman*, Anna Mukamal*, and Kendra Terry.* “Modeling Therapy as Discourse in Twentieth-Century American Literature.” American Literary History 35, no. 3, (2023): 1235–58. *The authors contributed equally to this research and publication.
17. Mendelman, Lisa and Gordon Hutner. “Diagnosing America: The Literatures of Mental Health in the US.” American Literary History 35, no. 3 (2023): 1123–31. Featured in “Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry, and Social Justice,” 1 September 2023.
16. Mendelman, Lisa*and Anna Mukamal.* “The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 11 (2021): 31–73. *The authors contributed equally to this research and publication.
15. Mendelman, Lisa. “Diagnosing Desire: Mental Health and Modern American Literature, 1890-1955.” American Literary History 33, no. 3 (2021): 601–19.
14. González, Octavio R.* and Lisa Mendelman.* “The Character of Literary Criticism.” ASAP/J Thinking With Essay Cluster (September 27, 2021). *The authors contributed equally to this research and publication.
13. Mendelman, Lisa* and Heather A. Love.* “Modernism & Diagnosis.” Modernism/modernity 6, cycle 2 (2021). *The authors contributed equally to this research and publication.
12. Mendelman, Lisa, Rabindra A. Ratan, Joseph Fordham, Megan Knittel, and Oskar Milik. “Sentimental Avatars: Gender Identification and Vehicles of Selfhood in Popular Media from Nineteenth-Century Novels to Modern Video Games.” Games and Culture 16, no. 2 (2021): 160–86.
11. Mendelman, Lisa. “Character Defects: The Racialized Addict and Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Modernism/modernity 26, no. 4 (2019): 727–52.
10. Mendelman, Lisa. “Unaffected: Marilynne Robinson’s Postmodern Sentimentalism.” Irish Journal of American Studies 6 (2017).
9. Mendelman, Lisa. “Ambivalence and Irony: Gendered Forms in Interwar America.” Arizona Quarterly, 71, no. 4 (2015): 23–52.
8. Mendelman, Lisa. “Feeling Hard-Boiled: Modern Sentimentalism and Frances Newman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin.” American Literary History 26, no. 4 (2014): 693–715.
7. Mendelman, Lisa. “Resonant Silence: Love, Desire, and Intimacy in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” GRAMMA 17 (2009): 129–44.
6. Mendelman, Lisa. “Critical Thinking and Reading.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 51, no. 4 (2007): 300–02.
Book chapters
5. Mendelman, Lisa. “Cather and the Health Humanities.” In The Oxford Handbook to Willa Cather, ed. Emily Rau (Oxford University Press, in production).
4. González, Octavio R.* and Lisa Mendelman.* “Passing Bodies.” In Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, ed. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 176–88. *The authors contributed equally to this research and publication.
3. Mendelman, Lisa. “Species of Sentiment.” Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, 1876-1910, vol. IV, ed. Lindsay Reckson (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 161–81.
2. Mendelman, Lisa. “Recounting the Literary History of Modern Women Writers: Teaching Quantitative Methods to Undergraduates.” In Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English, ed. Janine Utell (MLA Options for Teaching Series, 2021), 313–23.
1. Mendelman, Lisa. “Sentimental Satire in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” In The Sentimental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film and Television, ed. Jennifer A. Williamson, Jennifer Larson, and Ashley Reed (McFarland, 2014), 36–55.
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS AND HONORS
• Dean’s Scholarship Award, Menlo College, Atherton, CA, 2025–2026
• NEH Research Fellowship, The Huntington Library, September 2021-May 2022
• Harris Manchester College / Oxford University Summer Research Institute Fellowship, Menlo College, 2020 *Cancelled due to COVID-19
• Digital Humanities Summer Institute Scholarship, University of Victoria, 2020 *
• Modernist Studies Association Research Travel Award, 2019
• Charles B. Emerick Teaching Award, Menlo College, 2017-18
• Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts / US National Science Foundation Travel Award, Fall 2016
• Quarterly Teaching Excellence Award, UCLA Department of English, Winter and Spring 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2012, Spring 2011
