Paul Fisher

Paul Fisher is an internationally acclaimed biographer and cultural historian whose books have beenreviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Spectator (London), the Scotsman (Edinburgh), and many other venues. Fisher's bold, comprehensive life-and-times biography The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World has been lauded as “a truly defining work, and one worth visiting in order to relish every last detail" (WBUR Boston). His biography of Henry, William, and Alice James, House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family, was acclaimed a “golden bowl, brimming full” (Kirkus) and the Spectator listed it as one of its best books of 2008. Fisher has lectured widely and contributed to art exhibitions, most recently the landmark exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston’s Apollo, whose exhibition catalogue won the George Wittenborn Book Award for Excellence in Art Publishing. He has also worked on upcoming exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Tate Britain Gallery in London. Educated at Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Yale University, Fisher has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Emerson College, Boston University, and Harvard. He is currently Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.