Steven G. Kellman, Ph.D.

Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellowship in American Literature

Professor, English

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature who has been teaching for nearly five decades. He first joined UTSA in 1976 and is one of the university’s longest-serving faculty members. His teaching and research interests include comparative literature, literary criticism, contemporary literature, translingualism, Jewish literature and literary theory.

Kellman’s body of work and scholarly contributions are extensive. He has authored, co-authored or edited 12 peer-reviewed books, 11 refereed book chapters and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices and Orbis Litterarum. He has also written nearly 180 published book reviews to date.

He has served as co-editor of special issues of Critical Multilingualism Studies, Studies in the Novel, L2 Journal, American Book Review, and Journal of Literary Multilingualism, and is series editor for books on literary multilingualism published by Brill. He also served four terms on the board of directors for the National Book Critics Circle and was honored with their prestigious Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2006.

Kellman is the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (W.W. Norton, 2005), which was honored with the 2005 New York Society Library Award for Biography. Among his other books are Rambling Prose (2020), Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (2020), The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside (2019), American Suite (2018), Into the Tunnel: Readings of Gass's Novel (1998) and Perspectives on Raging Bull (1994).

Kellman’s teaching and research efforts have been recognized with numerous awards. He is a two-time recipient of the UTSA President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Recognition of Research Excellence (1991 and 2006), the COLFA Researcher of the Year Award (2021) and the campuswide teaching award (1986). He was also named UTSA’s first Ashbel Smith Professor from 1995–2000.

In addition to his professorship at UTSA, Kellman has spent time teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Irvine, Bemidji State College Minnesota and Tel-Aviv University. He was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Tbilisi State University in 1980, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria in 2000 and twice served as a Partners of the Americas lecturer in Peru.

Kellman earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a B.A. in English and General Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton.