Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin Visits The Prep

Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and (by courtesy) Professor of African and African American Studies at Stanford University.

Her principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice, focusing on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering voices that were silenced, marginalized or ignored in America’s past. Her work has been translated into over seven languages, and she has lectured throughout the world.

She is the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of 50 books, and has published over 150 articles, essays, columns, and reviews. She has earned multiple awards for her academic achievements and contributions to American Studies.

Over the last ten years, she has been working with our students via Zoom conversations and in reading students’ responses to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been in our curriculum for decades.

Her most recent book, Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade published by Yale University Press features 27 of our former Prep students’ comments in her chapter, “Jim in the High School Classroom.”

On September 11, 2025, Dr. Fishkin paid a special visit to Seton Hall Prep to thank and meet some of the 26 students. Her reaction, “I found many of their comments more insightful than those of many of the critics who’ve written about the book over the last 140 years—and I quoted 27 of them my book! It was an enormous pleasure to visit their school this week and present a program at which a number of them joined me. The students I quote in the book had graduated and were now in college—at NYU, Harvard, Seton Hall University, Lehigh University, Essex County College, Loyola Marymount University, and elsewhere-- but 5 of them came back for this event and 7 more participated via zoom. (In person: Devin Campaña, Julian Gray, Wiliam Kahney, Aryan Kapoor, and Isaiah Shoyombo; on zoom: Alex Andia, Logan Brzozowski, Matthew Corr, Alex Gitto, Jaysen Lim, Taylor Mason, and Connor Schmit). They were as articulate and thoughtful in person as they had been on the page. It was a pleasure to meet them in person—and to meet some of their parents and grandparents, as well.”