Dr. Susan Farrell is a professor of English at the College of Charleston where she teaches contemporary fiction, American literature, women’s studies, and academic writing. A long-standing Vonnegut scholar and founder of the international Kurt Vonnegut Society, Susan has published extensively on the author. Her latest book, The Good War and the Lousy Little Book, is an interdisciplinary project that combines biography, cultural studies, narrative history, and literary criticism as it tells the captivating story of how Vonnegut’s best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, came to be. It will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in Summer 2026.
In addition to her work on Vonnegut, Farrell has also published books and articles on numerous contemporary writers, including Tim O’Brien, Jane Smiley
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Alice McDermott, Louise Erdrich, Shirley Jackson, and others. Her previous book, Imagining Home: American War Fiction from Hemingway to 9/11, examines 20th and 21st century American war writers, arguing that these writers challenge traditional gender expectations, especially the notion that boys become men by going to war and girls become women by building a home.
Susan’s research and published work on Vonnegut and American war fiction are closely intertwined with her teaching, which includes courses on 20th and 21st century war fiction as well as past courses on the Vietnam War and 9/11 war fiction. She finds that her students embrace the subject of war fiction and recognize that the world of literary fiction allows authors to tell war stories through an emotional perspective that facts cannot create. She is the recipient of the 2009 Bill Moore Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Award Robert A. Miller Prize for best essay published in The CEA Critic
Farrell is a founding member of the international Kurt Vonnegut Society and has published books on Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien. The Vonnegut society has members from across the country, including some of the nation’s top Vonnegut experts who hold panel discussions at literary conferences, collect scholarly papers and advocate for inclusion in high school and college literature courses.