Mason Harris

Mason Harris received his BA from Harvard University in 1961 and his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-B) in 1971. His dissertation was on the fiction of George Eliot.

He started teaching in SFU's Department of English in 1966, the second year of the university's existence. He taught in the department until his retirement. His main subject has been Victorian fiction, and he has been interested in two genres that started in the 19th century and became very popular in the 20th: science fiction and the detective novel.

He has published on George Eliot, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and has written a book on the fiction of Joy Kogawa. He has also co-edited a collection of essays from a conference on racism and published a scholarly edition of H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (Broadview Press, 2009), setting this macabre tale in the Darwinian ideas of its time.