Professor Emerita Mary Jacobus has been named the M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2011-12.

As such, Jacobus is teaching an upper-level undergraduate course this fall, Fiction, Faction and War: Enlightenment to 9/11. In the spring, she will offer a graduate seminar focusing on psychoanalytic, phenomenological and philosophical approaches to writing about visual art.

She also will present a public lecture (topic not yet announced), Nov. 17 at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.

Jacobus taught at Cornell from 1980 until 2000, holding the John Wendell Anderson Chair of English and Women's Studies from 1989 to 2000. In 2000, she returned to the United Kingdom as the Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Churchill College professorial fellow. Jacobus also has been director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities since 2006.

She has written widely on literature, feminism, psychoanalysis, and visual culture, and her current work is on the artist Cy Twombly. Her work is both literary and interdisciplinary. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Art History Research Centre Foundation.

The M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professorship was made possible with a gift from the late Stephen H. Weiss '57, former chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees, in honor of his longtime friend, M.H. (Mike) Abrams. Abrams, the renowned Cornell professor emeritus of English, is best known as the author of "The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition" and founding editor of "The Norton Anthology of English Literature" for more than 40 years. Jacobus is the fifth faculty member to hold the professorship.