Marc Shell

Marc Shell Photograph by Stu Rosner Marc Shell is Babbitt professor of comparative literature, a professor of English, a MacArthur...

Marc Shell
Photograph by Stu Rosner

Marc Shell is Babbitt professor of comparative literature, a professor of English, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and these days, as he puts it, “a more or less inaudible stutterer, or stammerer.” That he was “slow of speech” was conspicuous in his youth, when he failed the fourth grade in his hometown of Montreal. His school principal explained to him that stuttering was a “sure sign” of being mentally deficient. He had also had polio, which some local doctors thought lowered the IQ. Today, when he lectures to an anglophone audience in Montreal and finds himself about to stumble over an English word—“money,” say—he substitutes argent, perfectly legal in that bilingual place and a stutterer’s coping device called interlinguistic synonymy. He’s learned other such tactics and tells of them and of much else about this enigmatic disorder in his fascinating new book, Stutter (Harvard University Press). Shell works in several general areas. One is aesthetics and economics, where he has done a two-part study of “the internalization of monetary form in literature and philosophy,” starting with Heraclitus. Another is Renaissance studies, where he has written of sixteenth-century European politics and the works of Elizabeth I. A third is language and nationhood. His Harvard website notes, “Professor Shell says that these three areas are closely interrelated.” Shell is also co-director of the Longfellow Institute for the comparative study of the non-English languages and literatures of what is now the United States. He is married, with two grown children. These days his son, reports Shell, “is the only person I know who counts himself free to tease me about my speech.”

Most popular

What Trump Means for John Roberts’s Legacy

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

Harvard Layoffs Continue, with More to Come

In the wake of federal government actions, several Harvard schools and institutes are cutting costs.

The Teen Brain

It’s a paradoxical time of development. These are people with very sharp brains, but they’re not quite sure what to do with them...

Explore More From Current Issue

Man, standing in small group of people outside the courthouse, holding a sign that reads "HANDS OFF HARVARD" in red letters

Harvard’s Summer In Court

What Columbia’s settlement means for the University

People sit in lawn chairs near a rustic barn at Cider Garden in New Salem on a sunny day.

Ciderdays Festival Celebrates All Things Apple

Visiting small-batch cideries and orchards in Massachusetts

Illustration of college students running under a large red "MAGA" hat while others look on with some skeptisim.

How Maga Went Mainstream at Harvard

Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.