Sharon Marcus

A fantastic course, thanks to Sharon Marcus' incredible teaching and radiant energy, I loved each class: an absolute Columbia gem. I am extremely grateful to have met Professor Marcus.

My expectation were brilliance, thorough insightful class discussions, deep engagement with the text and an organized class. I have to say that they class has fallen short to some extent. The discussions, while insightful at times, felt bland most of the times. The texts seemed to be administered just for the case and without much thought behind it. The professor gave instructions for the midterm one week before, and ended up switching these instructions during the midterm which caused a lot of confusion to the students. Also ended the exam 10 minutes earlier, falsely claiming that the exam took 1 hour 50 minutes while in real sense it was much less than that. I do feel like I had a better section last semester compared to this one, and unless you have taken her class before and loved it, I would highly discourage from ever taking her class.

Professor Marcus demands a lot out of her students. She expects consistent class participation, and careful analysis of most readings, and generally engages with everyone a lot both in class and over email. Still, most of the readings are incredibly well worth your time, and I truly have walked away with so much more knowledge about Victorian England through a framework of gender and sexuality studies. Although she is a little intimidating at first, Professor Marcus is also incredibly kind and very reassuring in her feedback. She makes herself extremely available for both casual and class-related discussions after class and during office hours. I expected a lot of work coming into her class, and I walked away satisfied after every class discussion as she facilitated some very interesting conversations and really allowed us to talk about what we were really interested in. All in all, I highly recommend taking one of her classes if you have the time.

Professor Marcus gives lectures that make you never want to leave class. At the end of a very stressful semester, my notebook from her class was the only notebook I didn't throw out. Her lectures are so organized but never dry and she knows her stuff. It didn't hit me until I took her class how important context is to unpacking any work of literature. I loved that she took just enough time to go over the most important pieces of context we needed before diving into lecture. Despite the class being a lecture, I didn't feel as though she gave away "everything" at all. She leaves a lot of room for students to pick their own topic in order to close read for their essays. (The TA was also very wonderful so it was a plus.)

She's amazing. She's so passionate about her subject. Her lectures are really clear and interesting. She takes time to know all the students individually even in a large class. I highly recommend her courses. The novels were really fun, ranging from Dracula to Jane Eyre. We really focused on Gothic literature. Oliver Twist was the worst book we read -- super anti-Semitic, but that just reflects the time.

If you have Prof Marcus for CC, you are very lucky. She might be scary at first, and requires written responses emailed in before every class (with citations!) but this is to make sure the majority of the class has a good enough understanding to have a good discussion. She leads discussions amazingly well. Even if I barely got a text reading it myself, I always came out of a class with a much better understanding of the author's argument, assumptions, weaknesses, and how it relates to broader issues. I took this class spring 2014, and now looking back and reading some of my responses and essay, I realize how much the class has prepared me for other philosophy courses by teaching me how to think creatively. Prof Marcus really brings out the best of her students! This being said, the workload is definitely heavier than other CC courses, but you will be rewarded for your work. If you are interested in philosophy and willing to put in effort, this class is for you. If you want to blow-off CC class, then it's not. This class probably embodies what the Columbia core wants to do for its students. Prof Marcus also stays after class every time if you have questions for her. She's pretty accessible despite being the dean of humanities, but if you want to meet her outside class you'll have to schedule and not just drop in.

I can't say enough good things about Sharon Marcus. I took her 19th Century English Novel class this semester and, despite my initial misgivings about a 60-person English class, I ended up loving this class and this professor. First of all, she is an amazing lecturer. I've always liked small English classes with a lot of discussion, but every day I would walk into this class and sit there entranced for 75 minutes. She clearly spends a good deal of time preparing her lectures, and they are brilliant and cogent and really elucidated the novels. She still encouraged class participation and was receptive to questions and comments. Despite the large class size, she was always available during office hours to talk about anything--life, career paths, religion, you name it--and just generally had a lovely demeanor. She gave a ton of feedback on the papers (though you might have one of the TAs as your grader) and offered extra credit assignments to give us opportunities to improve our writing/analytical skills. The novels themselves were fantastic; she introduced a few literary theories on the novels every class, but mostly focused on the novels themselves. Going to lecture really helped with the final because the prompts all addressed ideas discussed in class. (You should also never miss a lecture, because, as I mentioned above, Marcus gives fantastic lectures and you're doing yoursel…

Professor Marcus is an AMAZING professor. She is a fantastic lecturer, nice in office hours, and unbelievably knowledgeable in her field (seriously, this woman's a genius). I don't think she wastes even a minute of lecture, ever -- I was basically taking notes the entire time to get down everything she was saying. She provided really thorough analysis and insight into the novels we read (the structural analyses she does are really amazing) but still made some of the more daunting novels (i.e. Daniel Deronda) approachable. We read six novels over the course of the semester, with 3-4 classes (about 2 weeks) devoted to each. Marcus cut the seventh novel because she realized less and less people were keeping up with the reading, i.e. she's very understanding (the only time she wasn't was when she expected us to have read 200 pages of the next novel the same day one of our papers was due). She covered a lot of different themes/ideas (like marriage plot, realism, gothic elements, technology, etc.) and introduced a bunch of literary terms like physiognomy and exegetic/diegetic time, etc. She also did a really great job making the course come together, by showing similar themes in novels and how each author related historically to one another. Workload (mostly reading) got heavier as the semester went on, because the novels got longer and other classes also simultaneously got busier.…

Sharon Marcus has an amazing wealth of knowledge about Victorian fiction. She makes what can be extremely complicated novels, such as Daniel Deronda (Eliot) and Barchester Towers very approachable.The only issue is, sometimes, Prof. Marcus gives such a thorough lecture that it is hard to choose a paper topic which doesn't address examples or examine similar themes as those Marcus discusses in class. Professor Marcus was very willing to meet with her students outside of class, and made even non-English major students, such as myself, feel fully equipped to discuss and write about masterpieces of 19th century fiction.

First, Professor Sharon Marcus is one of Columbia's best professors. She is sharp, witty, incredibly sophisticated, and very well-versed in what she is teaching. Know that she will require you to push yourself, though, in terms of analysis, close-reading, and engaging critically with secondary sources. While there are many non-English majors in this class, they were surprised by how much they learned. This is a course for people who are interested in how people grow, develop, change, and ask questions about why we care about growth. Why are we asking questions about how to grow? How do we grow in the face of death? The reading load is heavy for this course, and the in-class essays can be daunting. However, if you do the readings and listen closely in lecture, you will be successful. Again, Professor Marcus cannot be praised enough; she is at the forefront of her field and is advancing ideas about how growth and development function in a literary context. Everyone should take this class.