Susanne Fusso is a specialist in nineteenth-century Russian prose, especially Gogol and Dostoevsky. She is the author of Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford University Press, 1993) and Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky (Northwestern University Press, 2006). Her most recent book is Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel (NIU Press, 2017). Her most recent translations are of Sergey Gandlevsky’s autobiographical novel Trepanation of the Skull (NIU Press, 2014), his novel Illegible (NIU Press, 2019), and the short stories of Nikolai Gogol, The Nose and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2020). She has also published edited volumes on Gogol, Karolina Pavlova, and Russian writers’ views of America, and a translation of the memoirs and hunting stories of Prince Vladimir Sergeevich Trubetskoi. She teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose and poetry as well as Russian language.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, she became interested in Russian literature while in high school and began her study of Russian at Lawrence University, from which she received a B.A. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University, and began teaching at Wesleyan in 1985.  Her scholarly interests have been shaped by her close friendships with Russian writers and artists.