Emily J. Orlando is the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of English at Fairfield University (USA). She is an internationally recognized scholar on the American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937).
Dr. Orlando recently edited The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton (2023), a collection of essays focusing on Wharton’s copious writings, cultural influences, and renaissance across 21st-century popular culture. With contributions from an impressive constellation of scholars from the US, Canada, Turkey, Israel, England, and France, the volume represents state-of-the-art scholarship on topics of perennial concern in Wharton criticism, alongside new directions for inquiry. Chapters reach across Wharton’s capacious oeuvre, including her achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known: poetry, drama, the short story, non-fiction prose. Contributors situate Wharton in the context of queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, film studies, anthropological studies, economics, and the digital humanities. The collection features new comparative studies with women writers and a fresh take on the pairing with Henry James. Included also are examinations of the places and cultures Wharton documented in her travel writing and other nonfiction. Book-ended by senior scholars Dale Bauer and Elaine Showalter, and with a foreword by the director and curators of The Mount, Wharton’s historic Massachusetts home, the Handbook underscores Wharton’s lasting impact for our new Gilded Age. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-handbook-to-edith-wharton-9781350182943/
On Edith Wharton’s 24 January 2023 birthday, Orlando was delighted to place this essay on the writer’s resonance for our Gilded Age in LitHub: https://lithub.com/author/emilyjorlando/
Dr. Orlando is also the author of the award-winning book Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts. https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817355524/edith-wharton-and-the-visual-arts/
She is co-editor, with Meredith Goldsmith, of Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism. https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813062815
Dr. Orlando has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture and is currently preparing for publication an annotated edition of Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses, which she co-wrote with the architect and interior designer Ogden Codman, Jr.
Orlando is a past President of the Edith Wharton Society and a member of the Editorial Board of the Edith Wharton Review.
Since joining the Fairfield University faculty in 2007, Dr. Orlando has taught 19th– and 20th– century literature and especially women writers. Orlando served from Fall 2013 through Spring 2017 as Director or Co-Director of the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. She currently serves the English Department as Internship Coordinator.
Dr. Orlando was recently recognized by two awards for her teaching and mentoring. In April 2019 she was honored to receive the 2019 College of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Advising and Mentoring. In 2019 students in the Honors Program voted her “Best Professor” for her Honors Seminar in Victorian literature and culture. In March 2020 English major Andrew Murphy profiled her for the Fairfield Mirror: http://fairfieldmirror.com/news/faculty-spotlight-dr-emily-orlando-ph-d/.
Dr. Orlando earned her B.A. at Saint Anselm College and her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. From 2002 to 2007 she taught as an Assistant Professor of English at Tennessee State University.
Orlando has given talks at conferences and various venues around the globe on Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Nella Larsen, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Siddall, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Some of her work is available here: https://fairfield.academia.edu/EmilyOrlando
Professor Orlando spoke at The Mount on Wharton’s birthday in 2014 and served as a curator for the Edith Wharton installation at Chicago’s American Writers Museum. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their beagles.
